So, I went to the gym tonight. I've gone to this gym a few times. Not many. The first time I ever went there I stepped onto a treadmill behind a cute blonde college girl. Next to her was a guy her age. Beside me was a fat, freaky-looking dude with big glasses and a goofy face. The moment I stepped onto the treadmill the goofy-looking guy turned to me and started talking. "Blah bleargh arroooooo," he said to me. It took me a moment to run this by all the various foreign languages I speak in my brain before I realized it was utter gibberish.
"What the fuck" I politely replied. Then I noticed he had crumbs of some sort all over his face.
He looked at me and I looked back at my treadmill and ignored him. No sense wasting time on a man who can't speak English. At this he grew angry and stepped off his treadmill, walking away still talking in his gibberish language, slowly disappearing around the corner towards the front doors. I glanced over at his still running treadmill and noticed that he had left his TV set on (every treadmill has its own TV). And also, he had left a half-eaten cookie on the treadmill where your iPod and car keys go. Hmm, half-eaten cookie and a treadmill. So, basically this guy, who is clearly retarded, likes to walk on the treadmill behind pretty young girls, watch TV, eat cookies, and annoy strangers with babbling. Lovely.
Anyway, that was 3 weeks ago. Tonight when I arrived at the gym I was relieved to see that he was nowhere around. I got on my usual treadmill and began to run. I noticed there was some sort of karate class going on in the aerobics room behind me, but I mostly just ignored it.
I ran 3 miles on the treadmill, picking up speed as I went, searching for the fastest pace that I could maintain without having to stop or slow down. Meanwhile, a hot blonde woman in a tank top and sweat pants walked past me. I, of course, didn't even notice her. I don't know how I was even able to tell you that she was there since I didn't look at her walking all the way across the room to the waterfountain where she may or may not have taken a drink before going into the women's lockeroom.
A few minutes later another women, also blonde, wearing a skin tight half-tank top and short-shorts came down the stairs from the free weight area. She was clearly a serious weight lifter, judging from the shape of her, which I did not even pay attention to at all. I also did not notice a small tattoo she had which was so very sexy. She was so rippled with muscles that her chest stood permanently up and out like some military man standing at attention. Not that I noticed, of course. She also went into the women's locker room, presumably to have sweaty lesbian sex with the other hot blonde woman. Shortly after, the first woman came out and left. Then the second woman did the same. I didn't notice any of this, though, because I don't gawk while running mindlessly on the damn boring treadmill. No, not me. I have my TV set, which I flipped over to Ultimate Fighting in order to distract myself from the fact that I was very nearly running fast enough to make myself throw up.
This is SO AWESOME!
I finally completed my 3 miles in a blistering time of somewhere less than 30 minutes. Awesome! I could probably qualify for the Olympics. Then I went upstairs to get some water before I passed out onto the floor. And then I headed over the to free weights. In the process of wandering from treadmill to water fountain to free weights I kept passing this girl, she was slim, but with all the desired parts and curves, wearing skin tight shorts and a tank top, and a scarf on her head. I don't know what the scarf was about, but passing her repeatedly seemed to trigger a realization in my brain.
Every single other time I have come to this gym to work out, there has not been one single attractive female person there since that very first day when I ran behind the pretty girl on the treadmill only to be accosted by the retarded Cookie Monster. In fact, since that first day, excluding today, there has not been any women at all. And then tonight I realize that I have seen at least three, two of whom were blonde and hot and sweaty and may have engaged in a porno-style lesbian sex scene in the locker room. Or perhaps I imagined that. I ran pretty hard on the treadmill and my mind got a little overheated. It's hard to know what was real and what was just a memory of bad '80s porn on VHS cassettes that my dad's VCR ate and I had to pay for.
"At last" I thought to myself, "I have found the Dream Gym, where hot women in nearly no clothing at all come to exercise while sweaty men gawk at them."
Please towel off the equipment after using it
Up in the free weight area, where I noticed the lone remaining reasonably attractive female was doing serious ab work, I shoved my way in amongs the sea of pumped up, sweaty, smelly men and grabbed some dumbbells.
It was then that I realized I had no fucking clue what I intended to do with them. I had no weight lifting plan for the night. I only came to run. Having done that, I was now just winging it.
I looked around, hoping none of the other guys had noticed the empty lost look of cluelessness in my eyes. Then I cooly grabbed a bench and started doing some Arnold-presses. Hey, if this exercise is good enough for Mr. Schwarzenegger, it's good enough for me.
As I was pumping along, frantically trying to compose a workout plan in my head before The Guys noticed that I was wandering aimlessly like some newby who didn't really belong, I noticed that one of the guys lifting weights there was a guy I had gone to high school with.
"What the fuck?" I thought to myself, pleased that the Obama White House hadn't yet figured out a way to censor our private thoughts and thus I was able to say 'fuck' in my own head without the FBI raping me with a Taser and throwing me into Gitmo or Guantanamo Bay. It was ... it was ... Stewart. That was his name. How the hell did I know him? I remember talking to him. I remember we weren't exactly friends. But where? We didn't have a class together. He knew someone, someone that I also knew. We only talked because of a mutual friend.
Another thing I remember about Stewart was that he used to be a lot smaller. He was never a tiny guy, by any means, but he wasn't any giant. But now, fucking A, Stewart was HUGE. Clearly he had been living in this gym for the past many years and doing nothing other than lifting weights since I last saw him. Either that or he's taking some serious steroids.
Steroids! That's where I knew him from! He was friends with a workout partner I once had who took steroids.
Dude, let's do some more curls
Not that I'm suggesting that Stewart has been taking steroids. After all these years it's entirely possible that he got this huge purely through hard work, good diet, and better fucking DNA than I've got.
And fuck him for having better DNA than me, DAMMIT!
No, I don't mean that. Lots of people have better DNA than I do. My DNA is shit. When God created my DNA I'm pretty sure he was in a bad mood. I might even say this in regard to my entire family, but purely out of the vain hope that someone unusually good-looking, athletic, intelligent, and successful might one day arise from the ashes that is my family, I shall limit this theory to myself. God took a steaming dump, and from out of that pile came my DNA.
This would explain why I was so good at running all those years ago. God must have had the runs.
I briefly considered walking over to Stewart and saying "Hi, do you remember me?" But I realized that after all these years it's unlikely that he does, and even worse, he might confuse me with someone else, such as an FBI agent who might be trying to bust him for illegal steroids and thus he could feel compelled to kill me and flee. As I was more than a little fatigued after running on that damn treadmill I decided against this option. I said nothing to Stewart and continued my makeshift - let's call it "freestyle" - workout.
I was also concerned that, what with President Obama declaring June to be National Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transexual Porno Pride Month, I couldn't recall Stewart having ever had a girlfriend back in school. What if he was gay? What if he was huge and strong and gay and decided he liked me? I have a sweet, sweet ass, I won't lie to you. My ass is my best, er, asset. This would be bad. This would be very, very bad. My legs were all run out from the treadmill and even though I have a vicious and whiplike front snap kick and once had a spinning back kick that could completely crush the fender of a maroon 1975 Buick Skylark with one "KIYAAAA", I still feel more comfortable with unpleasant violent confrontations when my running option remains wide open. As my legs were now nothing more than rubber, this was not the case.
Naked Gym Day - The women pretty much never show up
So I went over to a corner of the gym where several machines I needed were, where Stewart wasn't, and I pumped up my chest and lats until I thought my arms were going to fall off. In the good old days, this kind of pump was very impressive. I would pump these muscles and look like a Greek god carved out of marble. These days, though, my pump is more of a puff. I pump and I pump and when I look in the mirror I just look, er, puffy. It's considerably less impressive than the Greek god statues of old.
After puffing, er, pumping up some beach muscles, I headed over to the, um, thingamajig where the ab straps were hanging. I climbed up, looped my arms into the straps, hung like a gymnast, a sad tired puffy gymnast, and I did some ab work. It turned out to be a mistake to do my lats before doing this exercise, because hanging with my arms through the straps required that my lats remain tensed throughout, and the sad fact is, they were shot. Of course, I have abs of plastic, so they don't take long to run out of gas. But I usually prefer to work them until they ARE out of gas before I quit. This time it was the rest of me that ran out of gas.
You see, lately when I work out I get this feeling, it's only happened to me over the past 4 years or so, but my body tells me loud and clear when it is utterly and completely out of fuel. It says, "how 'bout we lie down and vomit?" And if I ignore it and try to 'push through' then I just end up sprawled out in the floor with some buff twenty-something guy and his uber-hot girlfriend telling me "elevate your feet up over your head. Here, put them up on this bench" while they both look at me with grave concern. This is not good for my self-image, so I try to avoid it as much as possible.
So, that unmistakable feeling began to hit me. It was time to go. I was running on fumes. And I was puffy enough for one night. And all the hot chicks had long ago left. And I think maybe Stewart was checking out my ass.