Real Exercise in Junior Year

I go through phases of wanting to get in shape, to become the lean and mean machine that I am certain resides underneath my soft, pale exterior, but I’m always too lazy. Every few months I’ll catch in the bathroom mirror a glimpse of myself that seems to leer at me, reminding me of the fact that I might as well give up my day job and go to work as an infomercial actor whose recurring gigs involve unflattering lighting, little or no makeup, and standing shirtless for a snapshot that will read: BEFORE. The thought horrifies me, and I tell myself all the things we tell ourselves: I’m going to start exercising again; I’m cutting out all the sugar; and that, if all else fails, bulimia can’t really be that bad. Holding strong at first, my resolve fills my head with images of produce and vegetables, of sweat-drenched hours spent on a workout bench. I’m doing laps in a pool of no-fat yogurt, or pumping iron with chickpea weights attached to a green bean bar. Protein will become my best friend, and — what the hell — why not just drive to the gym and sign the membership contract now?

All this before I’ve even left the bathroom.

Once I do leave and my reflection is no longer there, things aren’t so simple. Through years of practice, I’m well versed in the arts of overindulgence and sloth. My changing schedule and adolescent sleeping habits make it all but impossible for me to eat the right food regularly, and my lack of motivation for making my own meals only ushers me like the glutton I am to the quick fix of fast food. Exercise is incidental, the byproduct of more pressing concerns. My job in retail, say, or the thirty-four-foot journey I embark upon to fetch another drink from the kitchen.

I cannot help but like the ease of this lifestyle. But at the same time, pressing my face into the lukewarm circle of a heat lamp cheeseburger, special sauces circling my mouth like I’ve just savagely devoured the cow, I hate the shame.

Real exercise became a part of my life in high school. At the beginning of each semester the gym class would separate into two groups: one, the regular physical education students, would play games like volleyball and basketball, maybe football if the weather was nice; while the second would remove itself to a separate building entirely. My first couple years were spent attempting to avoid any contact with a basketball, whiffle ball, or anything of the sort.

Preferred days were spent playing volleyball, where one could, if timed right, adequately feign his attempts at sportsmanship without managing to fuck everything up for the other players. Besides, most of them were girls and so impressions about my manliness were superficial. Workout Wednesdays, as they were called, instructed us on basic calisthenics and made us jog around the gym. This required little coordination, and thus, I was good at it.

My junior year, though, I was tired and chose to try the only other option I had apart from suicide. The weight lifting program, I thought, would be a welcome break from the rigors of trying to make dodging a ball look like just another part of the game — especially when the activity was something like basketball, where anyone not helping score points for his team was viewed as the enemy and placed at the mercy of the more competitive boys. And, two of my friends were joining the weight lifting program, so I figured that if I failed at this, too, at least I would have them.

The first day, we marched in our gray t-shirts and unflattering green shorts through the cafeteria and outside, arriving at a square metal annex nestled into the L of the school’s north and east wings. My first glance of it gave me a panicked thought that the box was some sort of modernized torture chamber — something artless and unobtrusive so as not to raise suspicion. Inside, though, the place was much too drab for anything so extravagant. The single room, not much bigger than what cottage-dwellers might describe as “a little cramped,” was bathed in grays and blacks and reminded me more of a shed than anything else. Though the equipment the room held was frightening in its own alien way, the startlingly inappropriate lyrics to “Pimp Juice” coursed through the air as someone switched on a boom box and everyone set to their own devices. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all, I told myself.

Our instructor, a squat, bouldery man named Mr. Hanslow, gathered the new members of the group and explained to us the rules of safety and how things would run. After demonstrating the equipment, he assigned each of us a cheaply bound booklet in which we were to track our progress. After each weight lifting session and bout of cardio, we were to record our stats — he used the words “repetitions” and “sets,” which were as foreign in this context as the machinery surrounding me might seem at a restaurant buffet. Participation was required, he said, but it was also most of our grade. As long as we did the work, things would be fine. We could talk while we worked out, listen to music, and for the most part go at our own pace. It was not heaven, but it was at least a hallway’s march away from hell.

Over the next year and a half, I did as little as possible to exert myself. I never lost sight of my goal, which was pure and simple survival. Coming in first had never been my ambition. Not that I would’ve been able to had it been my desire. Looking at the boys and girls around the weight room, one could not help but recall images from a television show involving male bodybuilders and large-breasted women running in slow-motion on a beach. My presence was like an error, as if one of the crew, breathless and befuddled, had wandered into shot.

I would watch the others sometimes, wondering what it must be like to never have to worry about squeezing into a comically large pair of pants or look for t-shirt tags with more x’s than a late-night pornography film. And so I began to work. Not just to get by, and not to be the best, but with the goal of actually getting somewhere. I slid extra weights onto my barbells. Laps around the outdoor track were recorded with fewer and fewer seconds. Things were hard and I hated gym class for it, but I was relieved that the order and the necessity of it forced me to action.

The daily routines must have done something; I left high school skinnier than when I started. It might have been simple genetics, but I choose to believe that what exercise I got there helped me in some way. That, and I like the thought of having achieved something.

That memory comes back to me those days when I catch myself in the mirror, my image pink from the heat and surrounded by steam. And even though I know deep down that it may never come around again, I hold onto the memory of the high school boy I was and the dedication of sweating away my imperfections, repetition after repetition, set after set.