OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: Skipping the gym

This has been a weird year. (How's that for understatement?)

I was musing the other day on the video I record for this newspaper's Friday Style section, that this--11 weeks now--is the longest I've stayed away from a movie theater at least since I was a child, maybe in my whole life. Even when I was living in Brazil as a footloose 18-year-old, I went to the movies regularly.

I don't think I've gone this long without going to a gym either.

Our current gym is still closed and seems likely to remain that way for a while. Which is probably a good idea, but it's a strange for us. We've been getting by with free weights and elastic cords I set up in the garage, with bike rides and long walks. Karen wants to get back in the pool; I'd like to get back on a rowing machine. The gym used to occupy a large chunk of our week; Karen joked she hardly ever showered at home. What I miss most is the ritual.

It started in seventh grade. Rialto Junior High was too small to have a proper gym or cafeteria; we had an open-air square of asphalt, with yellow and white lines painted to denote the boundaries of various courts. There was a covered area where we could play dodgeball when it rained, but I don't remember what we did when there were smog alerts that kept us inside. There were pull-up bars of different heights; if you could do 10 Coach McAllister would call you a "stud." If you could do 15 pull-ups and 60 sit-ups in a minute you could get an embroidered patch from the President's Council on Physical Fitness.

There were a couple of makeshift weight benches, thinly padded planks over which cheap grained plastic was stretched and--where it overlapped the edges--stapled to the underside. On their upstretched arms rested barbells of a sort, constructed of two coffee cans filled with cement connected by a section of orange-painted pipe. Bigger ones were identical except they used gallon paint cans. It was rumored the larger ones represented about 100 pounds of weight while the smaller ones were closer to 75, but in retrospect they couldn't have weighed so much. No one ever knew for sure.

We were 11 and 12 years old, and Coach Mac was interested in our physical development. He wanted to turn us into football players, so one day after we'd run sprints and done monkey rolls on the grass and trotted four laps around the field (he wouldn't let any of us sip water until the last would-be lineman had finished the route), he had us gather around as he demonstrated proper bench press technique.

"Smooth and long," he said as he effortlessly pumped one of the larger barbells up and down. "You breathe out as you press up and you lock your arms out. Don't bounce the bar off your chest; it will bruise."

It wasn't long after that I started hanging out at the airbase gym, a converted hangar adjacent to a great paved expanse where the B-52s and the KC-135s taxied and stood awaiting maintenance. Inside there were two basketball courts: a full-sized one where thin-limbed young airmen from the Bronx and Philly and Chicago flew and dunked and launched what would have been three-pointers had anyone the prescience to paint the lines.

The other court was smaller, the domain of fathers and sons and pickup 21 games among the players waiting their turn on the big court. By custom it was divided into two half-courts, the better to accommodate the overflow from the main game. It was so short that running the floor wasn't much of a challenge; even a kid could make a reasonable shot attempt from beyond the free-throw line of the opposite end.

Beyond the small court was a large ceilingless room--it opened into the vault of the hangar--in which sooty black free weights were arranged on rubber pads. In the corner there was an unreliable rusted contraption with pulleys and chains and slabs of numbered weights. One wall was covered by cracked mirrors, and along this wall was a rack of chrome dumbbells.

My friends and I came to play ball, each of us secretly hoping to be called onto the main court to distribute the ball and run the floor with the men. We knew it was more likely we'd end up playing 21 or picking up a three-on-three game with some of the less athletic airmen on the small court. And sometimes, when both courts were jammed, we'd wander into the relative solitude of the weight room and poke desultorily at the equipment there. Sometimes we'd load up a bar and try to lift, but often we'd be spooked by the sight of thick sergeants with prison-yard chests smelling of sweat and rosin, their great knees swaddled in Ace bandages.

At my high school, basketball and baseball players weren't allowed to use the high school weight room unless they were really football players in disguise. Coach would have us jump benches or run in ankle weights, but during the season he didn't want us tightening ourselves up with squats and military presses. Push-ups were good, wind sprints were better, but taking grounders or shooting free-throws were best.

In college I preferred the old Baton Rouge YMCA to Louisiana State University's Huey P. Long Fieldhouse, despite the gruff old desk guy who insisted on seeing your ID every single time you walked through the door. My friend Chuck and I would work out among the serious muscleheads, balding guys in their 20s who grunted and speed-rapped self-affirmations throughout their two-hour workouts. We'd do preacher curls and punish our triceps by pulling cables and then go out to the basketball court to shoot around and miss hilariously, all our fine motor control blown by the workout. We'd pump up and go out to a smorgasbord place where we'd eat heaping plates of pasta followed by bowlfuls of sweet synthetic-tasting soft ice cream.

And when we hurt ourselves, we washed our shoulders in dimethyl sulfoxide, a miracle solvent that dissolved all skepticism. Same guys who sold us that could have got us human growth hormone, but (look at me) I never inhaled.

My gyms got less hardcore after that: chic athletic salons and downtown Ys with pale patterns tiled in the floor, sad hotel facilities with shag carpeting, storefronts open 24 hours. Workouts became less intense. Sometimes even perfunctory. Basketball stopped and my knees got better. Free weights got traded in for Nautilus, then later-generation machines, before we finally cycled back to actual iron.

After I finish this paragraph, I'm going out for a run. Then later on I'm going to find a place to go beat golf balls, by myself, at the far end of the range.

And wait for whatever normal might come.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

Editorial on 05/26/2020

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