The stinky gym

Speaking of the gym the other day got me to thinking about my continuous quest to find a “real gym” when I first got here. The landscape is much different now in 2007. Many of the European chain gyms have made inroads into Italy, thus making going to the gym a much more “normal” (people do not point at you anymore if you are wearing headphones while working out, for example) thing and bringing prices down. When I first got here, it seemed my only options were the really chi chi luxury gyms in the city center, which I couldn’t afford, or the one mom-and-pop gym in my neighborhood. The local gym is owned by Franco, a guy perpetually in a track suit. No self-respecting Milanese (even living “in provincia”) would be caught dead in public in a track suit, but Franco’s the “gym guy,” so it’s accepted around these parts that it’s just part of his look.

In my early days here, someone must have told Franco I was in the market for a gym because one day he stopped me on the street and launched into his spiel. At Franco’s urging, I took a tour of his place, and left not only in shock from how outdated his equipment was (think 1970s YMCA) but how outrageous his prices were, and this was still in the times of the lira. He was asking double what I was paying in New York, and my old gym back in the city was open practically 24 hours a day and was all-inclusive. At Franco’s gym, courses cost extra and the opening hours were something like Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturdays 9 a.m. to noon and closed on Sundays. Realizing that Franco’s gym was closed when I was typically able to go and that joining an old, often closed gym for double the price of what I had paid for a state-of-the-art, always open gym in New York was not all that practical, I decided that I would for the first time in my adult life remain without a gym.

Even in my poorest incarnations, I’d found a way to scrape up the money for my gym dues. But if my only option was joining Franco’s gym, I’d have to go without. I’d often see Franco around in his track suit and he’d stop and ask when I was going to come by - having someone stop you and ask you why you aren’t coming to the gym while walking out of the bakery with a huge piece of focaccia in hand makes for an awkward moment - but I’d mumble something about not having time. Apparently, I was fated to go to Franco’s gym because at the town carnival in the fall, I won "10 ingressi" (10 one-time entrances) in a raffle. The first time I went to the gym for an “information session,” Franco solemnly explained a long list of rules that ranged from my having to do a personal training session before I could use the gym to having to have special “gym shoes” that I could only use there. I could not wear the same shoes I’d walked to the gym in and in fact, I could not wear any shoes that had been used outside. Basically, I’d have to buy new shoes for special use at this crappy little gym. Uh, OK. I made a mental note to clean up a pair of old gym shoes and try to pass them as “new shoes.”

My first workout had to be with the personal trainer. I had hoped to be able to explain to him that I’d been working out in gyms for years and that I had my own little routine and didn’t really need the help. But the trainer would have none of it. He led me through a series of exercises that were so old that they made the Jane Fonda Workout seem innovative. After about an hour, I managed to wrangle free and finally get on an exercise bike to begin the warm-up of my own routine. To the stares of my fellow gym go-ers, I put on my headphones and began pedalling. After a few minutes, there was a tap tap on my shoulder.

“Sì?” I asked, taking my headphones out with annoyance.

“Give me 20 more minutes on the bike but don’t go as fast,” said the trainer, apparently unaware that our session had finished.

“Thanks for the tip, but I'm following my own routine…” I said.

“The first workout is with a trainer. Those are the rules,” he said.

So back to pedalling I went, until I was interrupted a few minutes later by another tap tap on my shoulder. This time it was Franco.

“Somebody tracked in dirt, and I see your shoes don’t look new. The rules are that you must use only new shoes in the gym,” he said as he handed me a photocopied list of rules, oblivious to the fact that my hands were already occupied, seeing as though I was biking while holding a CD player. I began to wonder why if these people were so concerned with the rules, they didn’t do anything about all the cars parked on the curb in front of the gym, thus blocking the pedestrian crosswalk and forcing all the old people in the neighborhood into the street with their canes and arm-loads of groceries. But I was still new in Italy at this point so I didn’t yet understand the differences between the arbitrary rules that were to be followed to the letter and the important rules to be ignored.

“These shoes are new. Never been worn outside,” I lied.

He nodded and moved on to the next bike, proceeding machine to machine throughout the gym to find the person who had infringed upon the virgin-shoe rule. The neighborhood gym quickly lost its charm, but I used all of my ten coupons the same. Every other session, Franco would interrupt whatever I was doing to point to my shoes and hand me the list of rules again. Each time I half expected him to enter the women’s locker room and declare my robe and flip flops non up to gym norms, but fortunately I was able to shower without incident. Furthermore, seeing the whole neighborhood (maybe it's just me, but I don’t particularly like double kissing while on the treadmill) while working out was just too distracting. For all of these reasons, I never actually joined the town gym.

But then as fate would have it, Cristiano and I were each given ten entrances to the neighborhood gym last summer. We dutifully went for our information session and got the same solemn warning about all of the rules. The gym had not changed much in five years except for the addition of a couple of new treadmills and various vending machines full of unlikely gym treats (cappuccino and cheese puffs after a hard workout, anyone?). We again were required to do the first session with a trainer and again we went through the exercises straight out of the early 1980s. After a while, Cristiano turned to me and said in English, “This place stinks.”

“Yeah, I tried to tell you. The equipment is old. They are freaky about the rules…” I told him.

“No, it literally stinks. Puzza!” he said wrinkling his nose.

Well, it was July in an un-airconditioned gym with old, sweaty equipment…

From then on Franco’s gym became known as “the stinky gym” and we resolved that when our sessions ran out, we’d find a normal place to work out, which is exactly what we did this past fall. So now when I see a track-suited figure coming my way on main street, I quickly cross to the other side. Poor Franco.