Finding Muscular Possibility and Radiant Energy at the Gym

It's been about five weeks now since I left my house in the dark one morning and drove to the gym down the road. It wasn't that exercise was new to me; it was that I was used to doing it alone in my house. Dance and ball exercises in the morning. A walk in the afternoon. Enough cleaning each day to count for something.

But at the gym I have, as I have said before, encountered community—women and men who come together for the purpose of pressing up against their own limitations. Together we struggle, together we overcome, and when we can't—when we cannot go round three of the bicep curls, when we can't adapt to the new samba step, when we have to relinquish our eight-pound weights for the five-pound weights mid-way through the tricep thunder, we are not in the business of judging the other. There's something so brilliantly non-verbal about all of this. Stories that don't require words.

I wanted, this morning, to say something about the women who lead these classes—women for whom I have enormous respect. I wanted to talk about how it is to wake up to radiant energy—to borrow another's until it settles in as one's own. I find, today, that I don't have the words. Maybe there aren't words for this body thing. Maybe there's only thank you.

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Gymtastics

So it happened: I joined the gym. I had gone all these years being the rebel non-joiner (I was clique-less as a teen, mommy-and-me free as a young mom, a failure in a book club, and I was kicked off a committee at church once for having too strong of an opinion about, well, most things). But I was getting bored with my little self-imposed, in-the-house exercise routines and my neighborhood jaunts have been lately messed with by these biblically saturated days.

So two weeks or so ago, I sashayed down to the gym and walked into a class called Zumba. Do you know about this? An hour of cardio set to Latin rhythms. I thought I could handle this because, well, you know: I dance. Let's just say I made it through. Barely. Nearly defeated, I rose the next day to conquer Abs and Arms, which is to say fire and indescribable pain. The next day I chose to think that I could Body Step my way to glamour (excuse me, but what's an A step? What's an L?). One day later, I could be found at Body Pump, thinking (the thought was all over my face): Barbells? Are you kidding me? For an hour?

Every day I'd come home and say, That's it. I cannot. The next morning I'd rise with the desperate hope of proving to me that I can.

And guess what? I am finding that I love the challenge. That I love the way the other women work, how they don't give up, how they make room for the one or two men, how today one brought me a mat and one brought me a chair, and how somehow community coexists with anonymity. I like thinking that maybe someday I can and that, already, so many others do.

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