The best thing about working out is going shopping.
I tell myself that exercise will do me no good until I have the proper workout clothes. After all, both mind and body must be involved for optimum benefit.
But after finding the perfect little red shorts and tight little T-shirt and modeling them repeatedly, alone, in front of the mirror, I realize the truth: I would rather get fat than ruin cute athletic clothes by actually working out in them.
Still, the gym visit can be put off no longer. I don my oldest, grayest sweats and set off for the OMAC, comforting myself with the thought that going out in public looking like such a slob must mean that I am really serious about exercising.
I stroll into the gym casually, as if I am here just to pick up some fruit juice or one of the Heralds that sit on the rack by the front door. The smell of sweat, rubber and something mysterious that I do not want to identify assaults my nostrils.
I take a deep breath that I instantly regret and scan for an elliptical toward the back, where fewer people will see if I fall off. After several false starts, I locate the power button and begin to pump. Pizza slices and East Side Pockets with extra hummus dance before my eyes like a mechanical rabbit in front of a straining greyhound.
To distract myself from my burning muscles, I study the workout area's other inmates. Everyone is wearing headphones and pretending to read but instead is sneakily checking out everyone else: their workout clothes, who's working out and how long they've been doing it. Little beady eyes dart furtively from side to side. A subtle and silent competition over who has run more miles springs up between adjacent machines. Eyebrows rise and faces turn red as riders surreptitiously pump to beat their neighbors. However, if one runner (who is also guilty as charged) triumphantly catches another in this behavior, the miscreant looks instantly away and pretends to have been regarding a particularly interesting crack in the wall. It reminds me of stories I have heard about men's bathrooms.
A professor descends from the left. Hastily, I avert my eyes. Seeing one's professor at the OMAC is as shocking and unpleasant has having icy water poured on your face in the morning. It is a commonly known fact that professors do not exist outside the classroom; they are human sponges to which students merely add coffee to trigger scholarly springs into action.
At the end of class, the lights go out and the professors crumple back into themselves. Seeing a professor biking with pale legs sticking out and sweat flying in every direction, with, God knows - maybe Eminem - blasting in his ears as he gets high off endorphins is just too much reality to handle. Now, from the machine next to me, the professor surreptitiously keeps tabs on my mileage.
Just when I think things can get no worse, the hot guy from the party last weekend, the one with whom I exchanged that admittedly tiny, but searingly meaningful glance across the dance floor that I hope he remembers, saunters in wearing a devil-may-care smile on his chiseled marble face and Nietzsche on his chiseled marble arm. Somehow, he still manages to look totally hot sweating on a running bike. I cower behind a curtain of hair, hoping that he will think I am Cousin It and not recognize me.
B.O. increases exponentially. My legs are losing feeling, and it is getting hard to keep my hair rigidly on the left. A freshman in a pale pink workout suit daintily climbs the recently vacated elliptical next to me, regarding my flushed face with distaste. Then she whips out her cell phone and begins chatting away while her legs move in slow motion on the lowest setting. (Not that I checked.)
In the next 10 minutes, I'm forced to remember more than I ever wanted to about being a freshman. She chirps to her phone, "Oh, my God, I'm beginning to sweat! Time to get off."
Merrily, she skips away, sipping a non-diet soda, because when you are still a fetus, carbohydrates don't count.
Then I smile, remembering that because I have been virtuous for the last 50 minutes, I, too, can eat carbs, and that it does not matter if I am sweaty, because my perfect workout clothes are still safe and dry in the closet.
Alexandra Toumanoff '06 is a transformer robot in disguise.
