It's my first day at the neighborhood YMCA I just joined and I'm going to vomit.
It's been almost a decade since my last honest to God workout and I've easily forgotten what it feels like to run further than the 10 foot distance from my couch to the Carlo Rosse jug in my fridge during the commercial break between "Brothers & Sisters"...And, yes, absolutely everything about that sentence was shameful. Huzzah.
I come into the Y for the first time, vaguely aware--based on my 3-day-straight KSU gym attendance-dash-ploy to appear fit for a dreamy young English professor who also frequented that gym--that with every gym there is gym etiquette, from wiping down your equipment after use, to steering clear of the personal training area unless with trainer, to time limits on machines, but I am unsure of what normal procedure is here. Naturally, in my mind, everyone in the designated stretching area notices that I do not have a towel. In fact, I missed the memo that said, "bring a towel to the stretching mats so that you don't contract arm chlamydia from our over-used porous surfaces. Love, your overly friendly neighborhood stretching mats xoxo."
So here I am hunkering down into an awkward squat to stretch my hamstrings, trying to maintain a bored expression to mask the agony within, when I look around at my stretching cohorts and am horrified to find every single one of them posing in some sort of impossibly twisted yoga-tantric-sluttified stretch. Damn! What is the point of bending yourself in half the wrong way so that your body can form a perfect O with your ankles by your face on the mat?
Question answered.
Everyone in my gym is a slut on display. From the girl on the elliptical with her shirt pulled up way too far to expose her glistening back dimples to the guys in the weight room squatting more weight than they probably should...it's a meat market and they're all butchers. And I'm the only vegetarian in the whole damn room. Narf.
ONWARDS! To my workout!
15 minutes later...AAAAND I'm done. Time to grab my gym bag , a towel, a glass of wine, and an ibuprofen. Not necessarily in that order.
