Working out is a bummer. Walking on a treadmill for forty-five minutes while listening to the same Metallica playlist over and over and trying to read the closed captioning of a television show you don’t even care about is a total drag. The elliptical machine makes uncoordinated people like me look stupid. The stair machine reduces mere mortals to tears within four minutes. The stationary bike feels like uncomfortable butt sex. Who wants to put the Twinkies down and get out of bed for any of that? I’m not sure that I have even once experienced the shot of endorphins surging through your body that is supposed to occur when you’re exercising, unless I didn’t recognize it because it feels the same as a heart attack or vomiting up your breakfast onto the sparkling white gym shoes you bought because flip-flops are frowned upon at the gym.
A couple of months ago my vegan Russian trainer moved to Hawaii so she could run ultramarathons in a temperate climate and mack on girls in grass skirts. At first I was sad, but then I thought, “Now there will be no one to scowl disapprovingly at my attempted push-ups! Hooray!” During our last training session, right after I’d completed seven of the fifty sit-ups she’d asked me to do, she said, “You are my most disappointing client.” And I interpreted that as “This tiny human says it’s okay for me to keep eating red meat and cupcakes in bed. Good talk.” We did some partner stretches, and after she adjusted my knee for the fourth time, she said, “I worry about you. We are going to text after I move.” I nodded in agreement while my brain said, “Fine! Joke’s on you! Texts don’t have eyes!”
A week after she left I got a text from THE RUSSIAN.
THE RUSSIAN: What’s for lunch?
ME: Lean Cuisine!!!
THE RUSSIAN: and what?
ME: Water…?
THE RUSSIAN: AND WHAT?
ME, breaking into a liar’s sweat: Um, oxygen?
THE RUSSIAN: WHAT ELSE?! [I could hear her shouting in my brain.]
ME, still trying to be on that bullshit: Granola bar.
THE RUSSIAN: You’re lying.
ME: Okay, okay, you caught me. A granola bar and an apple.
THE RUSSIAN: …
ME: And a Diet Coke.
THE RUSSIAN: …
ME: Oh, and I had half a doughnut this morning.
THE RUSSIAN: …
ME: Okay, fine, a WHOLE doughnut.
THE RUSSIAN: …
ME, sighing at my screen: Two doughnuts.
THE RUSSIAN: …
ME: And I might have also had a beer before work.
THE RUSSIAN: I hate you.
—
I’m not going to lie and say that I started caring about myself, because for real I mostly don’t. But at some point I was just like, “Yo, I do not move,” and I’m not old enough to get away with that yet. I’m lazy and research is boring, but I got on the Internet anyway to try to find out whatever I could about this Zumba torture I was about to subject myself to.
“Ditch the workout and join the party!” the official website shouted at my eyeballs. Zumba “is the only Latin-inspired dance-fitness program that blends red-hot international music and contagious steps to form a ‘fitness-party’ that is downright addictive!” I am suspicious of words like “addictive” and “contagious,” and I immediately blanched while clicking through all the pictures of lean and toned soccer moms gyrating in crop tops and neon bicycle shorts, their perfect bodies beaded with sweat, their toothy, openmouthed grins screaming, “I AM HAVING THE TIME OF MY YOUNG AND CONVENTIONALLY ATTRACTIVE LIFE.”
I am a negative person by nature, and I typically shy away from anything that requires me to be having visible fun. I like to do stuff that I can sit quietly in the back and enjoy, and I have spent my entire adult life perfecting a bored-yet-slightly-amused-and-entertained facade. And I just don’t understand being excited about exercise. It’s like doing a cartwheel on your way to have a root canal; my face just doesn’t light up at the prospect of abdominal isolations. Also? The pictures. Look at that instructor guy with his shirt off. I’m not trying to embarrass myself tripping over my feet doing watered-down salsa steps while some red-hot international instructor rolls his eyes at me in disgust and bounces quarters off his ridiculously chiseled backside.
The Sunday morning of my first class, I got up and put on socks and my old New Balances while remaining in my pajamas. I can’t compete with these jerks doing a revolutionary new fitness concept while wearing bikini tops, so I decided it was in the best interest of my self-esteem to go to the opposite end of the clothing spectrum and just look like absolute trash. Because even if I busted my melon open while trying to cumbia to the beat, at least my jibs would be appropriately covered. I took thirty-seven Aleve and a Norco and tried to inconspicuously stretch my Achilles on the train platform so it wouldn’t snap in the middle of a routine. When I got to the gym I paid the fifteen-dollar drop-in fee and found my way up to the dance studio. I hovered nervously near the back of the gym, anxious for all the JLo look-alikes to start pouring in and making me feel bad about that container of Greek yogurt I’d eaten in the locker room.
And then your mom came in wearing booty shorts and the shirt she wears to wash the dishes, flanked on either side by your aunt Judy and your recently retired fifth-grade teacher. Her sewing circle showed up next, as did her crochet buddies, and all the ladies from book club, with the exception of Kathy, whose son had strep so she decided to stay home with him. There’s the woman who cuts your mom’s hair, and Diane, who works part-time at Eileen Fisher in the mall. The schoolboard ladies, the PTA, and the hockey moms came running in, too, clad in biker shorts and racerback tanks with their hair pulled up in banana clips and scrunchies. I don’t know what I had been so worried about.
“I thought this was for attractive young people?” I wondered aloud to no one in particular.
A lady down the way looked me up and down. “Yeah,” she said, eyeing my flabby triceps and pulling a protein bar from her fanny pack. “ME, TOO.”