My Life at the Gym

Today I decided to take an independent venture to the SMU fitness center.

I've been to the gym at SMU several times this year, but I've never gone alone; I've always had some number of girlfriends with me, and it's always been at 10:00 in the morning.  But around 5:00 today, after a day of laying around all day and piling my cart with frozen dinners and chicken dinner fixin's at the grocery store, I decided I might as well go and get my fitness on for awhile.  I've been 0.7 pounds away from my current weight goal for like a week, and seem to not be able to lose it, and a fitness center excursion is more helpful to that end than laying on the couch watching TV reruns.

Getting to the gym was quite the effort.  I planned to quickly swing by Walgreens and then proceed to campus; a 15-20 minute journey, tops.  But, thanks to traffic from a broken stoplight, getting lost on a shortcut to avoid the highway, and general Dallas evening traffic, it took me a full 40 minutes to get to the campus that I live less than 3 miles away from.  Fabulous.

Happy to be at my destination, I plop myself down on an exercise bike, set the timer to 20 minutes, and start pedaling with Owl City playing through my headphones (they've been my workout music of choice lately...all peppy and upbeat).  I glance at the guy two bikes down and notice that he has a laptop strapped precariously to the front of his machine.  Trust those rich SMU kids to bring their expensive electronic devices to the gym with them.  I keep pedaling, staring at my laptop-free exercise machine, and think that I could have at least brought a book or something to look at.  The TV above my head is showing semi-intriguing news stories without captions.  No luck there.

As I'm usually at the gym with friends, I have someone to chat with while pedaling my life away.  Without a conversation partner, I suddenly realized the awkward set-up of the fitness center.  Three of the four lines of cardio equipment face the weight-lifting area and weight machines, and my recent machine of choice (the aforementioned exercise bike) is in the front of these three lines.  This means that when I'm working out on the bike, I'm staring straight at all the people lifting weights...including an abundance of young gentlemen who are far from unattractive.

Unlike the guy with the laptop, I don't have a convenient, interesting media-object to stare at unceasingly, and so my eyes naturally go to whatever movement is happening in front of me, which is all these muscular guys lifting various assortments of weights.  My scientific and well-researched observation is that big university guys are much more muscled-up (and more attractive) than small liberal arts college guys...and there I was, making awkward eye contact with practically all of them, because I have nothing else to look at.

Flirting is not my strong suit in any situation, and my flirting abilities drop approximately 10 points at the gym.  Unlike the skinny undergrad girls with their cute little jogging tanks and booty shorts, I rolled into the fitness center today in my teal French club t-shirt and brown stretchy cotton capris, with my hair pulled up into a non-elaborate ponytail.  But, if I had any modicum of flirting skills, I think I could have had some good results; maybe it was the French quote on the back of my t-shirt that made me seem all mysterious and bilingually interesting, or the fact that my straight hair generally has better double-take results with men than my curly hair, but I got my share of gym glances too.  Of course, being my non-flirting self, I generally responded to most of these by feigning sudden intrigue in the timer on my machine or the still uncaptioned TV set above my head.  Kind of counterproductive, but it's always my gut reaction when I see a cute guy looking in my direction.  Perhaps this is the root of my current singleness.

They say the gym is a good place to meet men, and perhaps it is.  There's certainly an abundance of men bopping about the various fitness machines.  But today, after completing my 20 minutes of exercise bike and 10 minutes of elliptical, I left the gym still guy-less.  Oh well.  Better luck next time, perhaps.