Irresolution

I ride a stationary bike five days a week at the local city-owned recreation center/gym and I’m not looking forward to next week when the New Year’s Resolution makers show up. The city gym doesn’t open until 9:00AM so it filters out working people from the morning rush but there are still enough retirees present that I’m occasionally forced to wait for a bike to become available. All those resolution makers will just clog up that minimally acceptable system during January.

Some years back, I frequented the Gold’s Gym near my home, but alas, the big gyms put them out of business. I liked the gym because I could show up around 3:00 in the afternoon and only twenty-five percent of the machines were in use. Every January, that gym changed. An additional fifty percent of the machines would be in use by those who made a New Year’s resolution to get in shape. Waiting was inevitable.

The New Year’s glut usually lasted all through January, tapering off by half during February and finally disappearing throughout the month of March. Once, I was having coffee with the owner of that gym and asked him why he didn’t just rent a lot of extra equipment for the first quarter of every year (I was hatching an idea for renting out used gym equipment).

The owner asked me where I thought he would install that temporary equipment. He mentioned that real estate was the number one cost of doing business for gyms and that they put the minimum space between machines that local fire codes would allow. Apparently, you must leave adequate aisle space for all those buff workout junkies to flee in case of fire.

That’s when I noticed that every available square inch of floor space was taken and, given that I was walking with a cane at that time, those buff workout junkies would have trampled me, leaving my old carcass to be toasted. Consequently, I’ve learned to accept the fact that experiencing the flatulence — both in sound and aroma — of the Arnold Schwarzenegger clone pressing heavy steel next to me, is not the gym owners twisted sense of humor, but rather the tyranny of local government.

It also turned out that all those resolution junkies signed a yearly contract and only showed up for the first three months, allowing the gym owner to charge less across the board, and benefiting cheapskates like me. Whatever the case, I’ll be happy when all those January gym tourists go back home and I can just stroll in, do my workout, and limp back out.

A meeting of great minds who think alike