bent out of shape

Other Jenny Columns:

Hating living in the Haight.

Jenny's neighbors. Neighborly attitudes in San Francisco.

Jenny and her roommate have a house guest from Texas.

I was under a rock eating Thin Mints the day God handed out legs. Now, people in Chicago don’t care how you look—they can’t even see you eight months out of the year since the only way to survive winter is to zip yourself into a sleeping bag before leaving your apartment. But one of the first things I did after moving to San Francisco was visit the Marina. During the day. And there they were. The beautiful people.

Rollerbladers. Runners. Bikers. The guys from Top Gun hitting a volleyball over a net.

I was no longer in a climate where amassing body fat was considered essential to survival, and I had to get in shape.

There are more than 60 health clubs in San Francisco for 730,000 people. Still I know there will never be a gym for what I really need, which is someone to do it all for me. Physical fitness is not into me. I have tried to be into it, I’ve joined sports, I’ve joined gyms, I’ve gone running up the bastard hills. But disaster has lurked in the shadow of fitness all my life. I have been thrown off treadmills; I have fallen off Stairmasters; I crashed rollerblading freshman year to limp to the student union dripping blood. In fifth grade I got pulled off the soccer field for running away from the ball, and in college I nearly got knocked into the Chicago River during crew practice by my own oar.

My latest attempt to change the will of God has been to join Market Street Gym at the corner of Church and Market. I am a "trade," which means I scrub smelly gym mats two hours a week in exchange for membership. After The Celluloid Closet, I thought for sure I could get a rise out of my parents by telling them I was "trade" in the Castro, but they didn’t get it, and the history of trade is not the sort of thing you explain to your parents if they don’t already know.

When I’m actually there to pretend to work out, my gym is a foreign land. I’m used to scoping and being scoped at the gym. But I am totally invisible in Market Street Gym because the clientele is 99% gay men. It is an indescribable feeling to be surrounded by men and have none of them be the least bit interested in showing you the right way to lift some metal bar or kick a bag. I could wear a Batman costume to Market Street Gym, and as long as the guys could tell I had tits they would ignore me.

As for the women, they all work behind the counter. And these are the reasons I will never find romance with any of them:

1). Our topics of conversation include: towels, locks, and laminated membership

cards.

2). There is no self-respecting way to walk by the front desk more than once on

the way in and once on the way out.

3). Since I roll out of bed at 7 a.m. and run around the corner to work out, my

cute factor is not in full working order by the time I hit the front desk, and

by the time I leave I look like Leonardo DiCaprio right before he died in

Titanic.

But romance was not the reason I joined in the first place. The point was to get in shape. So I have developed a routine.

First, I pick out something cool to wear. I haven’t worked out long enough to invest in truly sporty clothes, but I do have a sports bra and a tank top from the Gap. So I wear these. Pretty much every day.

Second, I run to the gym, find the erg and pull 500 meters, feeling superior that I am probably the only one in the whole gym who knows how to use the "rowing machine" correctly. I also hope I am the only one, because if anyone who knew anything about crew looked over my shoulder at the digital screen they would see I was pulling like a rubber chicken.

Third, I stake out a Stairmaster and open all the windows near it to get a breeze going. Then comes the fun part: taking a little quiz. The Stairmaster asks me personal questions to formulate a workout just for me. Like it asks me my weight.

And I lie. I lie to a machine. I type in incorrect numbers, as if it were asking me, "How much do you hope to weigh after you quit stopping by Noah’s Bagels every morning after you leave here?"

I justify all of this because joining a gym in San Francisco is more a way of keeping up with popular culture than keeping in shape. It’s not like I have any intention of learning the machines. I use a machine if no one else is using it, which is how I can work five muscle groups in one hour, voila! Whereas normal mortals work two or three. My granola roommate Sloan and her granola boyfriend Alex had a good laugh when I asked if I was missing any muscle groups by dividing mine into "upper" and "lower," sort of halving myself at the waist. Apparently this is not the way most people do it. But I don’t think I do most things the way most people do. Which is why no one will ever want to sculpt me out of marble. But in the end I might look good enough for someone from the gym to take me to breakfast, at which point we’ll have something to talk about: how great it is to be in shape

Jenny Pritchett

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