Hanging by a Moment

My university has two gyms. The one that I use is the smaller of the two, and I go pretty early in the morning, so it is usually empty. There is an undergrad who sometimes overlaps with me in the morning. I generally find his presence to be irritating. He structures his workout in a circuit, moving from one exercise to the other, and he will say “hey dude, I’m using that” from across the gym if I start to work in on a piece of equipment that, unbeknownst to me, is part of his circuit for the day. This kind of imperialism is a pretty strong breach of gym etiquette. He has also dropped some terrible undergrad beer farts in my face as he walks by my treadmill, dooming me to several minutes with no escape from deep inhalations of colon-processed Natty Light. I mean, I fart in public as much as the next guy, but I generally do not crop-dust the only other person in a fairly large room. In short, we are not friends.

This provides a bit of background to an experience I had yesterday morning. I was laying on the ground in one of the auxillary rooms of the gym, stretching and doing situps. This room is sort of a multipurpose group exercise room with some mats and floor-to-ceiling mirror along one wall. As usual, I am the only person in the room on this particular morning.

After about five minutes, the guy who likes to use all the machines and fart in my face enters the room. He is carrying a small stereo. What happens next is perhaps the strangest experience I have yet had in a gym. That is saying something, considering I have had conversations with naked professors, dealt with an old man putting his penis twelve inches from my fourteen year old face, and had a middle aged man with a mustache hit on me regularly at my parent’s gym when I was in college.

I am kind of watching him out of the corner of my eye. He takes off his shoes. “Alright,” I think to myself, “I guess he’s going to do some kickboxing (the room has a couple of heavy bags for this purpose). Then he removes his shirt. “I guess he is going to do some shirtless kickboxing. Not my style, but hey, different strokes.” Then he removes his shorts, and the only thought that my sleep-deprived mind can conjure is “Oh god.”

“Do you mind if I put on some music?” he asks me. I normally wear headphones, but had misplaced them on this particular morning, proving that whatever mystical force holds the universe together has a sense of humor. I would probably have been oblivious to the man standing before me in bikini briefs if I had been plugged into my mp3 player. “That’s fine,” I say.

He turns to his stereo and suddenly a song that can best be described as the product of a one night stand between Oh Fortuna and Final Countdown fills the room. Then, he locks eyes with himself in the mirror and begins to pant. “Oh god.” As his eyes widen, he pops and locks his right arm and then his left, like a white, awkward Michael Jackson. “Oh god.” When he clenches his hands into fists and brings them both down in front of his pelvis while flexing his biceps, I finally understand what is happening. This guy who likes to use all the machines and fart in my face is practicing poses for a body building competition. Apparently Walmart, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, and Lowes, colluding in a way that would appall the Federal Trade Commission, stopped selling mirrors, so this man has no choice but to hone his craft in a public place.

I have about three minutes left in my sit up routine, so I decide to just power through. And in any case, what is unfolding before me is a spellbinding display of pure id. The best moment comes when the Gregorian techno song comes to an end. I expect another shapeless slop of synths, chants, and bass beats to be next on the docket. Instead, this inexplicable man has chosen Lifehouse’s 2001 radio ballad “Hanging by a Moment” as Super Flex Track Number Two. His eyes widen, his grunts deepen, and he nods his head furiously at his image in the mirror as he hears the opening chords.