Daily Archive

This morning, before being handed a personal trainer’s business card for the second time in as many weeks, I was told for the first time in a while that I was going about something all wrong.

My first reaction was scorn and inner eye-rolling, hidden (I can only hope) behind my polite expression. The one that is a reflection of how important it is to me to be nice always in all ways, see also: so difficult to make mean or mad it exasperates just about everyone who’s around me enough to tell me they wish that just once, I’d lose it. I’m fairly certain that my state of rage is underwhelming to the point that no one should waste a wish on it.

But I was at the gym at the time, and the likelihood that anyone who, for a living, tells people how to do that right would judge my self-directed gym activities to be pretty much on target is vanishingly small. So I sighed (inwardly) and grimaced contritely as he broke down the folly of my empty-stomach cardio-reliant ways.

Unsurprisingly, there is a solution, called personal training. I promised to think about it, and wasn’t lying when I said I have been for a while. The question that keeps coming up, and maybe is the crux of any personal trainer’s selling strategy for all I know, is: why do I go to the gym?

It must be a good strategy, if it is one, or at least targeted precisely at suckers such as myself, because it hasn’t left my mind for any extended period of time.

I could answer it in so many ways, drawing on my advancing middle age, lifelong quest to achieve my personal best, dread of sedentary senescence, desire to feel a certain way in my clothing (and other ways in the opposite condition) – but I have yet to come up with that one compelling montage-cueing reason that leads to my optimally healthy sustainable set point of form.

I’ve never lost function, or at least never missed it, though I suppose that should still factor in. Form and function is what biology does, I seem to recall. Funny how thinking doesn’t always contribute to either as well as it might.