Social Anthropology: The Gym

I don’t think I belong in the gym.

There are so many types of people who use my gym that I’m going to have to give you a thorough run-down. I also need to be clear that I’m pretty sure I don’t belong there at all.

The douchebags
Plimsolls. Long socks. Wife-beater vests. Slicked-back hair. Pastel coloured shorts rolled up to just above the knee. The douchebags do a few gentle weights reps – arms only – as slowly as possible so they can watch their muscles gently flex in the mirror. They are douchebags.

The footballers
A couple of very minor league football teams are sometimes based from the sports centre which houses my gym. Their squad comes in as a group of no less than 20, dressed in their full kit, to sit on exercise bikes, occasionally pedalling gently, and watching themselves in the mirror. Occasionally they rearrange their kit so the logo is more prominently displayed. After 15 minutes they start to go down to the café and ‘reserve’ all the sofas.

The wannabe footballers
As above but clearly not in the team. Desperately try to get onto machines next to the footballers. Embarrass us all.

Triangular muscle beasts
Where have these men come from? They’re huge! And genuinely triangular. They must have normal jobs somewhere, they can’t all be employed to haul tractor tyres around car parks, can they? They briefly enter the changing rooms (sideways) to take off a tracksuit – leave it on a bench rather than in a locker – and then heave their enormous shoulders off to the Massive Weights Room of Fear downstairs. I take solace in the fact that they must look ridiculous in normal clothes – perhaps this is a vicious circle that explains why they are always in the gym. When they get back to the changing rooms they chug an enormous plastic cup full of ground-up bison and girders.

Pleasingly, this is a Google Image result for 'triangular muscle beast'

Members of the Pussycat Dolls
I assume they are students. But I don’t remember students like this when I was at St Andrews. These girls are ridiculous manifestations of the Essex WAG ideal – miniscule waists, long blonde hair, leggings, immaculate pink trainers and matching sweat bands on their beadless brows. To give them their due, the dolls work out. Hard. Do not make eye contact. They will crush you in their thighs of steel or abrade your face with their abs of titanium.

The female footballers
Opposite of the Pussycat Dolls. The ladies football team are hard as nails. Running sprints on the treadmills, then annihilating the cross-trainer, then weights then crunches then something else then another thing then more sprints. They are all 5 foot nothing and wearing baggy football kit, possibly a hand-me-down from the men’s team 3 years ago. The pace is relentless. They are there when you arrive and also there when you leave. They’re there now.

The old boys
My favourites. Aged anywhere from early-60s to late-120s, the old boys do not give a damn that their saggy race T-shirt from 1989 is full of holes or that the sweat flying off them is offending the Pussycat Dolls, they’re old and working out and it’s amazing and they’re going to keep doing it. Invariably wearing way too many layers for this level of activity, they can be seen noting the figures of the machine next them, occupied by a student who is one-third of their age, doing one-quarter of their workout.

“It’s off-season”
These guys and girls do not want to be in the gym. They want to be on the hockey pitch or golf course or ski slopes. They’re only in the gym because they have no other option to vent their extreme need for sport (and they kind of want you to know it). Easily identifiable by their club kit, elderly trainers and longing looks out of the window at the lashing rain and gathering clouds. They are not at all happy about the douchebags.

Happy running

Dave

You want a Legacy?

Right you lot – you’ve had your fun. The Olympics facilitated your gorging on evening and weekend TV, generated your boss’s good-natured tolerance of streaming events during work hours, and provided endless hours of gasps and cheers and tears and triumph. And now it’s your turn to contribute.

I hear a lot of people asking – nay demanding – to know what LOCOG intend to do about London 2012’s Legacy. These people say it with a capital ‘L’ to emphasise that this Legacy is Very Important to them. And LOCOG do their best to explain what they will do with their facilities and venues, how they will make sporting equipment and expertise available, and put their athletes in front of cameras heavily laden with medals and white-toothed grins. Meanwhile Mr Cameron does his best to insist that money will go in large volumes to the right places and that selling-off sports pitches isn’t a thing that’s happening at all. They are pleading with you to believe in their vision of Legacy and their capacity to deliver it.

I put it to you, however, that this Legacy is your responsibility as much as Coe’s and Cameron’s. You have been inspired by sport because it turned up in your living room for a fortnight. Now you have to go out and find it. If you want sport to be a part of your life or your children’s lives, then do something to make it so – Jess Ennis isn’t going to pop round with a set of hurdles and a javelin to teach you the heptathlon. Greg Rutherford isn’t going to suddenly leap into your garden with his coach’s whistle and a measuring tape. You are going to need to build on your own momentum. Here are a few suggestions as to how you can do that:

Go and see some sport

If you missed out on getting tickets for the Olympics, then why not go and see something else? Professional and high-level amateur sport happens every week in this country - your options really aren't limited to Wimbledon and endless football matches. I’m going to the EMC tests at Murrayfield in November, which were cheap. I’m planning to finally get to the Edinburgh International Cross-Country in January, which is free. If I was desperate to see Olympic mainstays like athletics/track & field, there are endless events up and down the country, including massive inter-county championships – here’s a list. Every Olympic sport will have public, usually quite cheap events that you can go to and have an awesome time at. What's stopping you?

Ambitious.

Sign up for a race

I say this all the time – but if you want running motivation then put some money where your mouth is and sign up for a race. Incidentally, you could do Survival of the Fittest for Venture Trust, which would be cool. Or why not run an event that your local running/athletics club is putting on? If you usually run the big, famous races, why not try something unusual and local? Or if you’re short of pennies then go to parkrun – it’s FREE, there’s one near where you live and I’ve told you to do it already.

Get behind the Commonwealth Games

Glasgow 2014, baby. Here we come.

Join a club

This is hypocritical – I haven’t been in a sports club since University – but you may find that joining your local athletics, football, rugby, cycling, hockey, triathlon, shooting, swimming, canoeing or any-other club will give you much easier routes to participation and a new social circle to boot.

Take up something new

One of the most bizarre and wonderful parts of the Olympics for me is watching athletes compete at the highest level in events which I was only dimly aware of. This should be the moment that Britain recruits a generation of talented handballers, finds swathes of future BMX champs and hundreds of people passionate about that weird 8-man kayak thing. I hate to think of the number of people who didn’t shine at the mainstream sports which were offered at school, who became labelled (and therefore learnt to think of themselves) as ‘not sporty’.  I saw a great tweet by Jeremy Vine that said “Facts that have emerged from the Olympics: Britain’s not rubbish. Football is not the only sport. The Queen can do jokes.” – why not dedicate yourself to a minority event? You might be naturally gifted at it. And, by contrast and in a ‘just saying’ kind-of way, Britain is pretty rubbish at football.

Jog on

I think I may have said this somewhere before. But I mean this in its broadest possible sense - leave the car at home and walk into town, buy a bike and use it to commute, go for a swim, hike up a reasonably big hill. Do literally anything to keep moving and active and energised. 

You want a legacy? Make it happen. The time is now.

Happy running

Dave

2012 to date: miles run - 282, miles biked - 69.2, metres swum - 2350, races - 3

I'm rubbish at executive exercise

I am hurting this week. Not the usual sore thighs, tight calves or wretched ankles which come with the territory of high-mileage running. Nope, this week I have pain in my abdominals, my chest muscles, my backside and my shoulders. And my thighs and my calves. What is to blame? A mysterious contraption called a PowerPlate.

I’ve been meaning to integrate other sports into my running for some time now. I love running, and if I could get away with it I’d do it all day, everyday, but the body needs time for recovery and also needs the chance to use different muscles now and then (also, I have a job to go to, and a social life to occasionally attend to). The best athletes, in any discipline, are the ones who can ‘cross-train’ effectively, supplementing their main sport’s exercise with other sports to strengthen muscles, reduce the chance of overuse injuries and generally add a bit of variety to their workouts. In pursuit of some of these cross-training benefits, I bought a bike last year, attend the odd spinning class, and go swimming now and then.  

Then PowerPlate enters my life. Linds and I had been offered a free trial session at a PowerPlate ‘studio’ in Edinburgh, and then a discount on our first five classes. It seemed madness not to give it a go, which we did on Tuesday after work. The idea is relatively simple – you do a series of exercises whilst standing, lying, leaning on or generally associating your extremities with a vibrating plate, which purportedly multiplies your muscles’ workload by a factor of 30-50, depending on which of the scary buttons have been pressed on your machine. ‘The technology comes from space!’ says the instructor rather grandly. I envision Martians coming to Earth and handing over a vibrating plate. ‘NASA invented it so astronauts could exercise effectively when sitting down’. It comes from Texas, then, I think.

The beast in question

The session starts out well. I lay out my ‘fitness goals’ for the instructor (sub 3:45 marathon, sub 1:35 half marathon – I want to be clear that I am a runner and not a gym bunny) and we run through the basic operation of the contraption. I am assured that the studio’s clients include ‘loads of runners’ and that this will ‘definitely help with my core strength, overall fitness, CV threshold and muscle mass' - he stops short of adding 'it will also do anything else you want in the whole world’. We copy the instructor as he starts a few warm-up exercises. The first few are not too arduous: some squats, stretches, leg lifts and the like, and I think that this will progress well. There is a good level of resistance created by the machine and I feel virtuous for actually working out in a gym, if a little ridiculous in the giant mirrors all over the room. Every exercise lasts exactly one minute, timed by the PowerPlate and usefully counted down on a digital display. I completely abstain from any competitive behaviour whatsoever, though I note that Linds does seem to be giggling more than exercising...

Then we move on to some more challenging exercises, and it becomes clear that the PowerPlate is an instrument of gravest torture. One example should be enough; on flat ground I can do 47 press-ups in a minute (I know this for sure, I literally just did them to double check). On the PowerPlate, with my hands on the unit and feet on the floor, creating an incline that should make press-ups easier, I managed just 26 before faceplanting and looking sheepishly at the unimpressed instructor. He reminds me that the machine is on its lowest setting. More hideous work follows, using footballs and weights and that strange stretchy material that physios often use. They are the longest minutes of my life.

The main selling point, repeated every 15 seconds, is that you get the equivalent of over an hour in the gym in just 25 minutes of PowerPlating. Linds and I go along with the delusion that we are high-flying City execs who only have 25 minutes to spare in our weeks for exercise. Clearly this is executive exercise. I try to resist calculating how long I spend running in a serious week (5 hours? more?) and think how much running I could do in that extra 25 minutes, plus the necessary time to get to and from the studio. I usually make a point of running to and/or from any athletic activity, even if it’s only a slow jog, but I could barely lift my arms to drive after this taster session - let alone use what was left of my legs to run home.

The session finishes with a ‘massage’. I lie with first my calves, later my thighs on the plate, now whirring away on its highest setting, while the instructor puts his entire body weight into pushing my muscles against the plate. It feels rather good, and restorative, until my knee clicks loudly and painfully, a sound usefully covered up by the industrial washing machine-like hum of the blasted PowerPlate. Then the session is over, and we drag our weary carcasses off the floor and back to the reception area.

Confused and oddly energised, a slightly self-destructive crazy-athlete mentality convinces me that I should hand over my credit card immediately and book a thousand sessions. Linds’s calm distrust of the whole concept curtails any booking of anything, usefully postponing such a decision until we’ve ‘checked our diaries’, and we shuffle our confused muscles out of the door. I discover later that the standard pricing is £190 for ten sessions, and they recommend a minimum of two sessions a week. Nearly two hundred quid for five weeks’ exercise? Very difficult to justify, and very definitely executive.

Then we reach today, where as discussed I still hurt in places that I am not used to hurting. I’ve run 10 miles in the last two days, arguably, but I am quite certain that this pain isn’t running related.  So once again my attempts to find an enjoyable, affordable and effective source of cross-training glory have been thwarted. If I’m honest, I don’t really want to find one. I run because I'm rubbish at executive exercise.

Happy running

Dave

P.S. Annoyingly, my 6 mile run on Wednesday night, 24 hours after using the PowerPlate, was the fastest I’ve done in ages. Hmm.