It Ain't Natural

Gyms are really, really weird places—totally bonkers strange. The whole idea of a pile of people showing up in an enclosed place to do what we're genetically and historically supposed to do outside flies in the face of the natural order. But for some odd reason we're compelled by a supreme act of will to trundle along to these places on a routine basis and offload our energy.

That in itself is strange enough. We now live in a society so overstuffed and surrounded by excess that we have to work hard NOT to get fat and bloated. In the relative scheme of things it wasn't really all that long ago that having a surfeit of energy stored in one's body signalled to everyone else in the village that you were a smashing success. A fat, rippling gut meant that you had the wherewithal to get your hands on more of the good stuff than your fellow resource competitors; it meant that you were king of the heap; the best, the smartest, the winner. You got it and they didn't and sporting a plus-sized frame served to advertise your awesomeness to all the losers grovelling at your feet.

Now if you're a fatty you're lazy—prone to too many hours in front of the TV scarfing down the family sized bag of Doritos while an old rerun of Elimidate plays out in front of your glazed-over eyes. Your sloth-like, sedentary behaviour results in an ever-increasing waistband which in turn signals to society at large that you lack the wherewithal to get off your expanding butt and do anything worthwhile with your life. You're a lazy slob and you deserve to be ridiculed for your lack of discipline. Although in a society where nearly everyone is a lazy slob the logic of that position quickly falls apart, but stacked up against our worship of all people thin and pretty and young you can understand the underlying sentiment. Our collective solution: pack a bag full of shorts, tank tops and iPods and beat a hasty path to the incubator of the weird and desperate—go to the gym.

Being kind of weird and desperate, I visit the gym frequently. For reasons still not quite known to me—I'm sure it's somehow Oedipal, but let's not dwell on it—I like to keep myself in decent shape. I'm not musclebound and sporting nary an ounce of fat, but I do my best to keep ravages of time and gravity at bay. We all do, don't we girls? Given a good week I'll get to the gym each weekday and sometimes on the weekend. I'll get in there, break a quick sweat and spread my smelly man-stink all around the machines and the people furiously operating them. And that's the best bit: the people.

As I mentioned, gyms are unholy and unnatural places. Logically they should attract the unholy and the unnatural, like the bleached-blonde woman who must be somewhere in her mid-fifties or so who has clearly spent too much time and money getting her skin stretched and her boobs pumped. She'll strut into the gym, eyes darting left and right in an effort to catch a glimpse of whomever might be mentally undressing her very sloppily thrown together physique. The sad fact is that she thinks she's turning the head of every man in there (and perhaps a few of the women too) and in a way she's right; the only problem is that they're turning their heads away and not towards. What a train wreck.

Then there's Mr. Universe. Some people, they're usually pretty easy to spot, are clearly on the juice. Mr. Universe is clearly on the juice. Around noon each day he's in there, his football-sized biceps and melon-round shoulders working in unison with his protruding chest as he heaves the biggest weights available. The odd thing is that he's only ever in there for about the same duration as I am: an hour. I was puzzled. How could this twenty-something hulk of a man balloon to such a size on such a lean workout regimen? He looks like he could easily front up to a weight lifting competition and win. Easily. It has to be those BALCO vitamin shots.

For about a week I'd been hoping to get a chance to quiz him about his routine—fire a few shots across the bow and see how he reacts; probe the armour for a chink or two. On Monday, after my workout had wrapped up, we were both situated in the same locker area.

"Mind if I ask you a question?"

"Sure, go ahead."

"I see you in here pretty much every day about the same time that I'm in here. You seem to put in about the same amount of time into your workouts as I do but you're clearly in much better shape than I am."

With that remark I thought I could see his left pectoral muscle quiver at the compliment. His right one ticked in sympathy. They were happy.

"Yeah," he said, "I've been doing this a long time. And genetics has a whole lot to do with it."

And anabolic steriods, I thought to myself.

"How long have you been working out?" he asked.

"About four years," I replied. It's the truth.

"I've been at it for about ten, " he informed me without inflecting his words with the kind of smug self-satisfaction I was expecting, "and I'm just the kind of guy who puts on muscle mass easily."

Yeah, and I bet you're the kind of guy who finds steroids pretty easily too, huh? I thought it. I didn't say it.

Humbled in the presence of his mighty musculature, I mumbled out an ill formed response. "Yeah, that genetics stuff is right on. I just don't seem to add muscle very easily. Plus I do mostly cardio at lunch with some weights after work."

"Well," he confidently stated as his deltoids arched up like a couple of open drawbridges, "some people are no-gainers."

I heard it right. He was calling me a "no-gainer". By extension he was throwing himself into the gainer camp with all of his Schwarzenegger wannabe buddies and casting me out with the feebs. So be it. I'm a feeb. I can take it.

"So you only do one session of weights a day?" This was my attempt to call bullshit on him.

"I do some cardio in the morning and then the weights in the middle of the day."

And when do the 'roid shots happen, huh?

The conversation was done. He'd fended me off pretty well and it was clear from his now-dismissive body language—with a frame that big the only language his body knows is a form of yelling—that we were done.

"Well, it looks like you've got a routine that works for you. Well done."

It was over. There were no obvious puncture wounds, no clear signs of chemical enhancement abuse. Within a few minutes my kit bag was packed and I was meandering back out to the main entrance of the gym, ready to return to work. As I walked out I made sure I kept my chin up, my stride long and confident, while I did my utmost to detect out of the corner of my eye who was paying attention to this handsome man as he made his way out.