Back to the Gym

Okay, I confess. I have made that most banal of all New Year's resolutions, namely to get myself in shape.

But this year I have an extra incentive. The thrifty part of me that hearkens back to my dad's love of a bargain and the motto – “Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or go without” – has made me answer the call of the January coupons for “free trial memberships” that every local gym seems to be offering.

Thus far, I've had a week at the Y and I've just finished two weeks at a new gym, which I could probably follow by one more trial if I pushed it. Don't get me wrong. I really am looking for a gym, and I do intend to pay for it, but not until I've explored every cross-trainer, every weight machine, and every free 30-minute personal training session to get the best bang for my buck.

Trying out the Y was actually a return to familiar ground since I used to be a member there for years before I moved to Albuquerque. I took prenatal dance before my first son was born by C-section, and afterward returned to post-natal classes. By the time I was pregnant with my third son, I was no longer paying much attention to all the hype about not getting your heart rate up too high or worrying about lifting weights.

I was working out on my due date when one of the trainers came up to me and asked when the baby was expected to arrive (I looked like an advertisement for Omar the Tent-Maker at this point). “Oh the baby is due today, actually,” I replied nonchalantly. With a look of horror, the trainer took one more look at my belly and said, “What the hell are you doing here then?” as if he expected a Hollywood scene to ensue with water bursting, me screaming and panting, and the arrival of a baby on an exercise mat right there in front of him.

So I was rather sad when I returned during my trial period and didn't see him there. I wanted to tell him that my son had arrived a bare fifteen minutes after I arrived at Stanford Hospital, just to get a rise out of him.

It was a little eerie seeing the same cast of characters I'd grown so used to, still working out, no one either visibly thinner or fatter, but all with the little quirks I'd grown so fond of. There was the elderly man and his wife who always worked out together; he often wore a Tam o'shanter on his head and sported a tie-dye t-shirt. Or the guy who always biked to the gym but never took off his windbreaker while he worked out; I never understood how he didn't die of heat exhaustion keeping it on after a hard ride. Or the friendly woman who always used to come up to me and say, “Now I know I've seen you before, but I can't remember your name” as she proceeded to introduce herself for at least the fifth time. To be fair, I never remembered her name either, but I always felt like I was in some kind of Star Trek time distortion whenever we went through this ritual

You may wonder why I took such an interest in my fellows as I did my own exercise routine, but I learned long ago as a graduate student when I started a weight training class at a university gym: “The guys are going to look at you; lifting weights is really boring, so don't take it personally.” That was the advice of our female trainer who was there to make us feel comfortable in this relatively alien territory, and it certainly freed me from any inhibitions about letting my curiosity have free reign while I was resting between sets.

But what I loved most about the Y was the fact that I never saw a woman arriving to work out in full make-up or with perfectly matched leotard or workout gear. The Y crowd was an unpretentious group, who came there to get a workout and not to make a fashion statement.

So it was with regret that I came back to find that although all my favorite cast of characters were still there, the gym had also been caught in a bit of a time warp so that the machines were rather out-of-date and that the place had grown even more crowded in the intervening years. It was difficult to get on the machine you liked or find a space to stretch afterward.

I will be moving on to one of the newer facilities in the area with their state-of-the-art exercise machines, and pristine facilities, but I hope that in trading the new for the familiar, I'll still find the people-watching part of my exercise routine as entertaining as ever and the folks I exercise with similarly unpretentious in their pursuit of good health. After all, it's much more fun to watch people when you work out than CNN.

Be It Resolved

I'm not a big believer in New Year's resolutions, but since I actually managed to keep two of them last year, I thought this might be a good time to take stock of how they affected me.

Last January I was feeling at a loss over what to do with myself. I knew that I could not teach at the University of New Mexico because I was taking a three week trip to Chile in the middle of the semester, but I couldn't imagine not working at all.

So I resolved to do something I'd never done before, and I began substitute teaching at my son's high school. The results surprised me: I had never taught at this level before, and I liked the rapid give and take of a high school classroom.

Unlike my college classes where students are often much shyer about speaking in front of people they don't know well, these kids had no problems talking, sometime too much. And they weren't shy about asking for a “study hall.” “No way,” I told them. “They're not paying me to babysit you.” There were groans, but they usually gave in with a good grace.

For a class on poetry, I started by asking the students to write down one thing they liked about studying poetry and one thing they didn't like. “Analyzing the symbolism to death,” was the consensus on the negative side. So I had them first study the meter and sounds of Emily Dickinson's “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” rather than looking for deeper meanings, and many of them were able to find the symbolism on their own.

At the end of the class, one girl looked at me in surprise and said, “No one's ever asked our opinion like that before. Thank you.” Those are the moments that make teaching a pleasure.

My second resolution was to start writing this blog, and that too has had surprising results. I hadn't done any writing for pleasure since I finished my book nearly ten years ago, and I was worried about not being good at it any more.

I also hadn't followed many blogs, and I had no idea what the “style” of a blog was supposed to be. So being the inveterate academic that I am, and I went to the library and checked out a book on the “best blogs” and found that it was pretty much the wild west on the blogosphere: hardly any rules applied.

Finally, consoling myself with the thought that probably no one was going to read it besides my friends and family, I put up my first post, “Why me?” followed by 66 more posts.

To my amazement, people actually read it. I received many comments (more offline than on) from friends, family, and people I've never even met.

Writing this often can be hard. I worry that I'll run out of things to write about, and then I read something, or hear a story on the radio, or my kids surprise or vex me, and there I am off again to my laptop to blog about it. Becoming a regular writer again has not only given me a voice, it's also brought me great solace and a deeper understanding of who I am.

So what lies ahead for 2009? Check out my next blog.