I’ve got a personal trainer/and a wall full of tapes/ I have only one hobby/it’s staying in shape/my body’s my business/and business is good/not everyone does it/but everyone should
Gym, by De-Regulator, 2006
When I was five, I got run over and saw my own thigh bone coming out of my leg. I used that as my cloak of invisibility, in the exercise yard of life, until I was 15, when – in a stroke of sheer good fortune – I got run over again and broke all my toes. That saw me through until I was 18, by which age nobody can force you to run anywhere you don’t want to.
For the next 12 years I was an exercise refusenik; I was too busy smoking. My jogging style hadn’t evolved since my first accident, so if I did try to run, it was as a toddler, elbows in, wrists out, hands waving, like a 70s comedian pretending to be gay. After 30 seconds, I would be in a state that apparently (I found out much later) personal trainers recognise quite well as the hallmark of a person who lives 30 years without any physical activity: you go red, but you don’t sweat. You do not deserve sweat. Your body has never learned how to sweat.
You meet plenty of people in this phase – they are just as likely to be middle-aged exercise-disenchanteds as young exercise-haters. They always have wonderful lines, mostly borrowed from Mark Twain, about how the human body has only a fixed number of movements, and it’s a shame – an outrage against God, even – to use them up unnecessarily. This idea has some basis in the truth: athletes don’t live very long. The average life expectancy of an elite athlete is 67. The average life expectancy of a player in the American National Football League is 58. It is most probably all the performance-enhancing drugs, though, rather than the simple exhaustion of their lifetime’s supply of jerks. I don’t think this is a great argument against doing anything. It’s unlikely, as well, that you will become an elite athlete if you wait until the age of making smartarse quote-based remarks before you even try it.
I prefer this idea from Normal Mailer: “Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body – it just wears it out.” There’s a philosophical backdraft to that, a sense in which the futility of exercise wreaks its own peculiar decay.
But anyway, I had to change course. It seemed pretty clear that if your body had forgotten how to sweat, then somebody – let’s call them you – wasn’t looking after it properly. I still didn’t believe exercise made you thin. I still thought the causality was the other way around: thin people just have a lot of nervous energy, which they like to find uses for. Nevertheless, taking the Pascal’s wager approach, whether or not exercise made you look better, it couldn’t make you look worse; it couldn’t make you less healthy. So you’d hit your deathbed either having gained something, in longevity and/or wellbeing, or wasted some hours that you would have found some other way to waste anyway.
For maybe the first two years, I was the least fit person in the gym, the person so breathless they can’t even go to an aerobics class for fear they’ll trigger some atavistic kill-the-runt behaviour in their classmates. After that, I was merely in the bottom 10%. That’s a figure I could live with, and still can. I had a lingering sense that there was something fundamentally wrong with an entire culture in which physical jerks would be chased for their own sake, not as toil for some other achievement, not for glory (there is certainly no glory in aerobics), not for competition, just for… the sensation of having done it.
There’s something up with that, isn’t there? It has the dodgy smell of the Roman vomitorium, a society at the end of its days, doing a hell of a lot of something, for no reason. But anyway, look, I can sweat now, can’t I? Let’s not go into this too deeply.
Then, in 2006, I heard the De-Regulator song, and I date my gym avoidance to this moment. It’s sheer bad luck that I even came across it, since I am not an avowed fan of electroclash. Clearly, I’d been looking for reasons not to go to the gym ever since I first started going – I have a sore toe, I think I’ve got a cold coming on, I have an allergy to R&B (that was mainly an excuse not to go to Spin) – but none of these was solid.
I read in a magazine that if you’re really trying not to go and do exercise, promise yourself that you’ll stay only 10 minutes. Once you’re actually there, after 10 minutes you’ll most likely find yourself staying an hour. This is the 12-steps approach – I won’t never drink again, I just won’t drink today. I think it’s a bit dishonest (to yourself; yourself would know after the first time that it was being lied to).
Once De-Regulator’s narcissists’ anthem has got into your subconscious, there is no shifting it. What’s really going round your head, as you surge up to 12kph on a treadmill, without holding on to the railing and forming involuntary snot bubbles out of your nose? You’re thinking about how fit you are, and how great you’re going to look, and how much better you’ll look than a.n.other person who doesn’t do what you do. Why don’t you just admit it?
Self-love is the bread and butter of this Lycra world; it is what you have for pleasure, instead of real bread and actual butter. Nobody would ever say this to a gym-goer’s face, because it would be rude and unnecessary. I wrote it once and the barrage of complaints was hilarious. “How dare you call me narcissistic?” one said. “I am 72 years old and I have never been fitter. My legs look gorgeous. My arms look like Jane Fonda’s, without the sun damage.” “Maybe if you weren’t so minging,” said another, “you would know what it felt like to love the way you looked!” “I put in 2 hours a day and I GET OUT WHAT I PUT IN. I am like a golden god, if you could see the way women look at me. They see someone BUFF and HOT and they like what they see!”
It was compelling, but as an argument against narcissism, not so much.
Sure, a certain amount of obnoxiousness is part of being alive, but the song ruined it for me. The taste of sweat mingled with self-righteousness, and it turned the moral high ground of the muscle ache to ash.
There are two discrete types of exercise avoidance: the one where you’re in the habit of going to the gym, and you just want to get out of it that night. And the one where you never go, and you want an excuse never to start going. A fear of narcissism won’t work on four successive occasions, but it will be enough to reduce your habit, until suddenly, from going three times a week, you’re going once a week, and from here you’re thinking, “Once a week. It’s a bit pointless, isn’t it?” It’s like going to a French lesson once a month. It won’t improve anything; it will just remind you how much better at it everybody else is.
So I have arrived back at inactivity, but I’m not yet so wedded to it that I’ve cancelled my membership: this is what I miss about going to the gym; all that self-love is enjoyable. It’s not like playing an instrument or joining a choir – you don’t rate yourself against people who are actually good, even professional, at that sort of thing. Since the activity is sought for its own purpose, and there is no delegating your own aerobic antics, it would be physically impossible for anyone to do it better than you. At improving your own health and appearance with your own efforts, you – yes, you, soldier-in-a-leotard – are the best person on earth.
I miss the use of muscle-as-metaphor. People who do a lot of exercise love saying things like, “Democracy is like a muscle; it works for the people who use it.” Or, “Knowledge is like a muscle – you use it or you lose it.” Or, “Freedom is like a muscle: when you’ve really used it, you can always feel it.” Or, “The heart is like a muscle… No, wait, the heart is a muscle.”
When you never use your muscles, you really lose your hard-on for describing abstract qualities as similar to them in any way.
I miss making my fella feel unworthy, too. Generally speaking, the person who gets to leave the house for an hour owes a debt of service to the person who stayed in and made sure the kids were watching telly properly. However, when Person A has been to the gym, not only have they had an hour off, they are also a better human being than Person B, even – at a push – a better parent, since they’ll be less burdensome in old age. So, yes, I miss that a bit. Who wouldn’t?
If I had sworn off ever lifting a muscle again, I am sure I would think of other things to regret, but this is my killer manoeuvre: I haven’t given it up. It’s just a deferral. I’m looking at this as my gap year. One day soon, I will decide that narcissism is bad, but batwings are worse. It might be tomorrow. I would say it might be today, except that it is way too hot.
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