It's Life, Gym

Yesterday I went down to the local gym for the first time in ages during the week. I joined a few years ago and to begin with I was down there three or four times a week in the evenings and at weekends. This tailed off in the way these things do but I still kept up weekly visits - usually on a Sunday afternoon.

A while ago my daughter moved back into the area and registered at the gym, and she is still in her enthusiastic phase and she is encoraging me to go more often, so last night I got home from work early and were down at the gym by 7.

I could not believe how crowded it was. There is usually a bulge in membership just after Christmas while people work through their new year resolutions, but this was ridiculous: it was like being at the first day of a sale.

There has also been a dramatic change in the mix of people. I gave up listening to the music or tv feeds ages ago and found it much more interesting to look around at my fellow gym enthusiasts. It starts out by just watching but inevitably ends up by trying to categorise them.

There are still the Posers. Usually young women in designer gym gear with ipods and very fixed expressions, they are dedicated to looking good and not working up a sweat. They always seem to succeed at the latter and often at the former.

There are still some (but ominously fewer) of the Lastchancers, who have clearly been told by family/friends/doctors that they must lose weight or else. They are the stoics of the gym.

There were hardly any of the Pairs. There were a lot of these last summer: a gym regular and their newbie mate. Usually male, they are characterised by the regular shepherding the newbie from machine to machine and explaining loudly and often with dubious accuracy how to use it, and half demonstating it in an I-could-be-a-Personal-Trainer-if-I-wasn't-so-busy mode.

A subset of these are the Couples, where the whole thing is much gentler, varying from the businesslike (Come on, we agreed to do this) to the heartwarming new world discovery of new love.

I only saw one Professional. These have always been quite rare, but are very obvious because they hammer the machines (usually the treadmill) with a no-nonsense determination and quite frightening intensity, going on and on at a speed and a level that leaves me in awe.

This time there were a lot of Youths, just-eighteens going round in groups of three or four, spending more energy on larking around with each other than on the machines. They were everywhere I went somehow, laughing and joking about the machines like they were some kind of smutty sex accessories. They made me feel old.

What overwhelmed the place though was the influx of Heavies. They can't all be bouncers (police intelligence is that they are mostly drug dealers or their muscle) but they are built like brick shithouses, with unfeasibly large muscles (getting shirts must be a real problem) that shout SUPPLEMENTS or HGH across the gym. There seemed to be several distinct groups and last night they all seemed to be very watchful of each other. They weren't menacing or anything (in fact they tend to be very polite and helpful) but they just seemed to fill the place up.

Which group am I part of then? Well, obviously, the non-judgmental serious excerciser group. The group that everyone thinks they are in.