Health Care: Life at da club...

Another week, another beat down.  But this time I found it difficult to walk out of da club, and was considering my options.

My problem wasn't that I wanted the exercise to stop, but rather that I actually found it difficult to maintain a standing or walking position.  My balance was shot and my muscles burned deeply.

I arrived a little early so that I could jump on an elliptical or a bike for a few minutes to warm up.  The wife had decided not to come, as she was planning on dusting off her Jane Fonda-ish workout video and giving it yet another shot.

"But who's going to drive me home?" I begged.

She then reminded me that I did have a cell phone, and that we only lived minutes from da club.  Bitch.  Pain is much easier to deal with when you have someone to whine to immediately after the experience.  Doesn't she fucking know that?

I saw Danny when I was all ready to go, and he passed me off to Brendan.  I knew it was going to happen sooner or later.

There are two kinds of employees down at the trainers' desk.  There are the black shirts and the blue shirts.  It's kind of like Star Trek in that way.  If you try to think of everything in terms of Star Trek, life does become a little easier.

Until you try to explain it to normal people.  Then it's kind of... weird.

The black shirts are the leads.  They sell the "all the pain you can take and more" packages, start the training so they can analyze your needs and your style to find the right blue shirt for you.

The blue shirts are the trainers.  Generally speaking, they don't have as much personality and are not nearly as fun as the social butterflies that are known as the black shirts.  And of course I'm taking that from my vast knowledge of blue shirts I've talked to.  Two.

When this had all clicked in my brain, I realized something.  And in the Star Trek context, it's perhaps the worst thing ever.  I was wearing a red shirt, and this is technically an away mission.

Fuck me running.

My new blue shirt friend is a professional Martial Arts fighter, and has been for 9 years.  He looks like he's barely old enough to drink and weighed roughly 8 lbs, 4 oz., but what the fuck do I know about that?

The only real "fight" I was in lasted for about a tenth of a second.  However, the teasing afterward went on for about a week.

I was in high school.  One of my football teammates (you know the one... the asshole of the team), started talking to me and my actual friends on a Saturday night at the local hang out.  I was drunk, because hey... it was Saturday night and I wanted to get a jump start on training for college and beyond.

He gave me shit for it since we were only 16, and I told him to go to hell (I think).  He pushed me, and my head hit the wall of a building and I was done.  

Yes, I cried.

Not a great story, I'll admit.  But when I see this guy at the 20 year reunion, I'll wait until he's drunk and then blindly try to punch him in the face, shrieking like a little bitch, "Who's the loser now, asshole?"  

But I'll be drunk too, so maybe I need to come up with a different plan.  I definitely need to get in better shape.  At least I've got a year to train for it.

"I'm not a professional fighter," I said to the blue shirt.  "I'm an amateur lover."  I'm so witty.

I don't know whether he just didn't get it or if he was ignoring me.

"Though I have been thinking of going pro."

Crickets.

This blue shirt had all the personality of an on duty cop.  What a hard ass.

So the blue shirt beat me down like only a redshirt knows how to take... and I think that would be a great title for a country song, at least in the Star Trek realm.  And at Sci Fi Conventions.  Whether you call them Trekkies or Trekkers or Trekkors, they're still fucking geeks, and they just eat up shit like that.

Taking a cue from last week's beating, I decided to go to the strongest part of my body, my legs.

As a side note, during my evaluation, Danny (the black shirt) was surprised by my leg strength.  I did a max of about 330 lbs. on the leg press.  However, I think he was also equally confused by my lack of arm strength.  So maybe it all evens out in the end.

I've always had solid legs.  I get that trait from my dad's side of the family, who are mostly all "sturdy" folk.  Let's just put it this way... none of them are wearing skinny jeans, even the skinny ones.  

I tried on skinny jeans once (when I was skinny) and felt like I was going to burst out of them like the fucking Hulk, only I would have been the Incredible Albino Hulk -- or the Great White Hulk, which I think sounds a little more ominous.

Though, does the name really matter if you can't fight and are prone to cry easily and often?  Might as well be the Great White Hulking Mass of Grown Up Baby.

The blue shirt took me around the gym, beating my legs senselessly.  Or maybe it was sensefully, as it was with purpose.  

Either way, it still fucking hurt.

It was kind of a blur.  I remember lots of different modified lunge positions, a large step, squats, leg curls and more lunges.  Of course, all were done in combination with each other, multiplying the pain factor by 10 to the sixth power.

We finished it all off with a tough but fairly light core workout on the mat, and we were done.  I was breathing heavily, my red shirt drenched in sweat, but didn't feel nearly as shitty as the week before.

Then I tried to get up.

Then I thought about what it would be like to just stay there until I could stand.  

Then I thought about staying the night.

I figured that I could sleep on the mats, though I'd probably need a blanket or a fire... or a different fucking shirt that wasn't completely fucking drenched.  I looked like I had just been in a water park with a half-day pass.

Considering I was a redshirt, I knew that if I stayed I was doomed for sure.  I'd get eaten by an invisible creature or get a laser beam to my brain.  Either that or one of the gym's numerous cougar population would surely devour me, most likely out of sheer desperation.  

Especially the mother of all cougars.  The wife and I can't help but notice her in da club every single time we go.  She prowls around, always in a different tight outfit to show off the hardened muscles under her leathery, over tanned skin.  That, combined with her bleach blonde hair and the creepy vibe she throws off (kind of a cross between a realtor and an axe murderer, or Suze Orman), she has come to be one of the ones to watch (out for) at da club.

And, like the wild cats in the fucking zoo, she has a particular route she always takes in her lair.  She walks from the classroom, winding around through the machines to the main aisle so she can get a look in the free weights section, bounding up the stairs to scope out the ellipticals and bikes before grabbing one of the treadmills.  Then she'll hop off the treadmill and head back down the steps to stop at the basketball court, walk past the racquetball courts (especially during the weekly tourneys) and walk back to the classroom.

I'm never sure if she's looking to find a free machine or if she's looking at the people.  Though I usually feel violated in some way when she breezes past me.  

But if I remained on the mat, I don't think she'd be able to resist a helpless, brightly colored animal.  And I don't think my wimpy arms or terrible fighting skills would help any.  I had to get up.  

So I pushed off and wobbled up on my feet like a fucking newborn foal.  I then proceeded back to the trainers' desk, walking like I just had my first colonoscopy (or a really shocking time at a roadside rest area).

I thanked my blue shirt for kicking my ass without killing me and scheduled my next beating.  I can already tell this is going to be... fun.  Riiiiiiight.

Health Care: Getting a beat down...

"I think this will be more informational than anything else," I said as we walked toward the door.

"Oh," she said, looking a little confused.

"So who knows? Maybe I'll join you when I'm done."

She nodded, whipped out her key card and threw it in front of the scanner. As the machine beeped, I pulled my card out from my sweatshirt pocket, waited for the beep and followed behind her.

After going up to the desk, I filled out some paperwork, thinking about the events that led me here, my goals and aspirations... you know, all that standard fru fru shit you think about when trying something new.

I wish I had thought harder about the pain.

The worst ongoing torture I've ever suffered was at the hands of my sixth grade gym teacher, Mr. Melonich. And no, his fucking name wasn't John, and I never wished to be be him. He's really not even one ounce of cool.

Mr. Melonich was a forty something guy with a beer gut and greased back hair full of Grecian Formula. He also always wore blue polyester trainer shorts -- the same kind you'll see trainers and coaches wearing on the sidelines at football games... any football games for you foreign fuckers, even soccer.

He was, for lack of a better term, both a hard ass and a crack pot. And I think he subjected us to the same torture as he received as a POW in Viet Nam. I don't know if he was actually in the war, but I can at least imagine him in a movie about that war. He's the guy that breaks from the pressure and leaps up screaming, firing his goddamn gun in every direction as he runs through the jungle, never to be seen again.

The torture he made us endure: Neil Diamond.

To start off every session of gym class, we had to do the same fucking thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It was a warm up, he said. But I think this unimaginative asshole thought his brand of consistency didn't stink. Think again, you fuck nut wing job. Or is the phrase fuck wing nut job? Either way, he was plenty nuts.

When we entered into the gym for class, he would be waiting for us with his record player out, his itchy trigger finger on the needle just dying for us to take our places. We would stand in lines, a couple of feet from each other, and that familiar beat would ring through our ears and into our brain pans. We would wince as we started stepping.

"Right, two, three, four. Left, two, three, four," he chimed, watching us dance. It wasn't just some aerobic workout he made up just for the kids in his class. It wasn't just any Neil Diamond song.

He made us perform the Electric Slide to "Sweet Caroline." Every fucking day we had gym class.

I still can't listen to that song without thinking back to how I really wanted to break that stupid record over Mr. Melonich's head, shoving the shards into his skin and telling him to dance like a shit-throwing monkey. Yeah, I know that sounds over the top, but even as I write this my blood starts to bubble harkening back to "ye good olde days."

Actually, maybe I'll try to look him up after all these years and tie him to a chair for 8 hours and play that fucking song over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. It'll be just like he's back in Viet Nam... or at least back on the movie set.

Then there was my football coach, Mr. Soukup. It sounds like "soup cup," without the P. Actually, I wouldn't mind peeing in his soup cup and watching him drink it down for all the pain I've suffered on his orders.

He would grab my face mask with two fingers and pull me close to his head just so I could watch it explode all over me. He barked his orders in a rough, gravelly voice not unlike that of a seasoned war general. "When I tell you to do sumthin, you DO it! Now get in that B gap, you son of a buck!"

"Son of a buck" was that guy's catch phrase. He might as well have said "flibberty jibbet" or "monkey moots." Everytime he got on a rampage though, the entire team was saying, "Mother fucking piss cock whore-ass butt-munching fruit-tard!"

I played as a backup guard in 9th and 10th grade football, and after two years of hell with Mr. Soukup, I opted out of continuing my high school football career. Well, that and I hurt both my fucking knees doing tackle drills and wind sprints and shit like that. But i was only ever hurt in practice, as I usually only saw about two minutes of game time each week.

Did I mention that I sucked at football too? I didn't suck as hard as, say, fucking basketball... but I still sucked.

One of Mr. Soukup's favorite things to do was nothing short of pure evil. The practice field was atop a steep hill just beyond the high school's parking lot. It was probably a forty foot climb to the top, at roughly a 40º angle.

With all of our pads on in the heat of the August 2-a-days, he would have us crab walk up that entire stretch. A crab walk, for those that don't have a fucking clue as to the torture this could be, is when you "walk" using your hands and feet with your chest facing up toward the sky instead of the far more comfortable way with your chest toward the dirt.

This asshole wouldn't just make us run it once either. We crab walked up the hill, head pointing uphill -- which is tolerable as a stand alone exercise. However, we would then be forced back down the hill to crab walk with our heads pointing downhill.

Our arms gave out. Our brains melted. We spat up blood. We died. But no one bitched. If you bitched, you ran it twice more. I wasn't going to run it any more than I fucking had to. I'd see some of the other assholes I rode the bench with try to speak up only to be sent back down the hill as the rest of the players watched. Like failing the first time wasn't humiliating enough!

Other than that, though, my life has been pretty clear of people who offer me pain. Maybe a little too clear.

So, I made an appointment at my gym for a trainer.

It seemed to me to be the next logical step in my evolution. I've reached a point in my life where I was going to set a healthy goal. In part, this is because I've changed my life from when I could eat anything I wanted to eating reasonably well. At first I did this so that I could drink more -- why spend all those calories on food when it only hampers your buzz? Then I started eating less so I could drink more because I was too fucking fat and I wasn't about to stop drinking.

Maybe I should have stopped eating all together, to concentrate on just drinking. I digress.

But I recently made a commitment, which I know others my age have made all the time. They continue to make the empty promises and new year's resolutions to get into shape... other than round, that is. But I had never made this commitment to myself before. It actually felt exactly like the time I quit smoking, that mental switch just clicked on and I knew I was ready.

That, and I'm 37 years old and I still don't know how to use the fucking gym.

So I made my appointment with Danny, the buff model superstar athlete quarterback asshole. But he seemed like a nice guy. He actually looked like he stepped off the set of a workout video. He was a little too tan, his teeth glowed a little too white, and he was packed full of knowledge, energy, and optimism.

So yeah. I hated him pretty much right away.

We chatted, and he told me everything I already knew about health clubs and routines.

"We don't do routines here," he said.

"You want to shock the system and be able to adjust and compensate for optimal performance, eh?" I said. He didn't hear me.

"We want to be able adjust everything for optimal performance and results," he smiled back, his gleeming teeth burning small holes in my retinas. "And sometimes we like to really shock the system and shake things up."

And that was twenty minutes of my life... listening to his infomercial on why personal trainers rocked serious monkey cock.

He led me along, me actually jumping three steps ahead of him in my mind. Yeah, yeah... let's get to the pricing already!

He didn't show me the pricing. Instead he decided to really, really hurt me. Badly. You don't know how painful it is to write today, actually. I never realized I used my triceps this much in order to push buttons.

He pulled me out of his little makeshift cubical and led me into the free weight section. I hadn't walked into the free weights on purpose since fucking high school. Of course, I looked the part too, especially in comparison to all the meat heads working out beside me.

I did the bench press, concentrating on the down motion instead of the up... after 10 reps, I did 10 pushups with my hands pushing on two medicine balls on the floor. My arms were already burning. Eight more reps on the bench press, 6 push ups, 5 more bench press.

My arms were fucking dead. We could have stopped there, but noooooooooooo.

He worked me out for a solid half hour, and with each passing moment, each set, each rep, each weight, my arms became mushy appendages attached loosely to my torso. It went beyond pain back into that numbing feeling some say they achieve just before death.

My face contorted into shapes I didn't know it could make as I grunted and panted my way through each exercise, staring into the mirror as I tried to block out everyone around me. Sweat poured off my head, leaving the floor as if some pregnant woman's water burst where I stood.

But I didn't quit, even when my body did. At one point toward the end, I was doing an alligator crawl, using one of those blow-up aerobic balls to slide on with my chest, pulling myself forward with my hands until only my knees were supported by the ball. Then I crawled back with my hands to a resting position. I went forward again on Danny's command.

"Now do two pushups."

What the FUCK do you mean by that???

My muscles felt like they had been put in a blender on puree for 10 minutes. They felt like they had been left in the Magic Bullet for a full 10 seconds. There was no fucking way...

I tried.

"One," he chimed.

My muscles burned so badly a small fire actually started. The sweat sheeting off my body quickly put it out.

I went down for the second pushup and my face almost hit the floor as I quickly rolled off the ball and lay back staring up at the ceiling. Bloody mother fucking douche bag asshole cock pushup!!!

I saw a white light through my bleary vision, and I thought about what a great life it had been. Well, it was at least better than some, I reasoned. I saw a shadow encroaching on my lighted tunnel to heaven. It was... Danny.

"It's okay," he smiled, staring down into my sweat drenched face on the sweat drenched floor. "I'm supposed to do that." He was ecstatic. "Let's move over here!"

Fuck you, Danny! I could think of nothing else I wanted to say to him. You're a real piece of shit, Danny! You come off as this nice Louisiana boy with great posture and perfect fucking teeth, but deep down you're a sadistic prick with a deep hatred and severe intolerance to people that maybe have a few pounds to lose. Okay, 30 pounds. Fuck you! 35!!!

The wife decided to present herself a couple of times during my workout. She was doing cardio. I wanted to be doing cardio. I wanted new goddamn arms. I also wanted her to drive us back home.

I needed her to drive us back home.

After a good beating, Danny likes to go back to the paperwork and talk about his packages. Well, not his packages, but the club's packages. His whole plan was to disorient, then pounce. He's like a cat that plays with a mouse before ending its life. He's like that deep water fish with the stupid fucking lightbulb on its head from Finding Nemo.

We talked about options, and I put up a little resistance here. I know he's looking out for what's best for the club while still trying to help me out. I know he's got a bottom line and projections and spread sheets and graphs and things like that, even if he won't let the public see them.

I wouldn't let him out-savvy me!

"Then we'll see you Thursday for your full evaluation," he said after another five minutes of wearing me down.

"See you Thursday. Assuming I can still move."

Asshole.