I’m Too Fat to Go to the Gym

I hate women’s sweat pants. I hate the pockets that aren’t deep enough to hold your house keys while you are working out, they inevitably fall out as soon as you sit down at the ab crunch machine. I hate the absence of drawstrings and the cheap elastic waistband that rides up over your stomach, hiking the pants as far up your rib cage as they can possibly go. Even worse, they always end up looking high-water, a la Michael Jackson before his second nose job. Women’s sweats always come in colors that add girth to your caboose, like Smurf blue, hot pink, bubble gum pink (gag me!), lavender, buttercup yellow, or the worst of all the wrong colors to wear on your bottom half, WHITE.

I buy my sweat pants in the men’s section of Wal-Mart. They are cheaper, they fit more generously, they have a nice drawstring that you can adjust to make the waistband ride at your waist where it belongs, they are longer and shrink less in the wash, and they come in flattering, sane, DARK colors. The darker the better, so those sweat blotches directly under your bazoom, armpits, and the small of your back are less conspicuous. I was also grateful when those racing striped running pants with the slightly flared calf made out of dark nylon came back in style. They aren’t just for Charlie’s Angels anymore. I have two pairs that I have pretty much worn to death that I got from Target two years ago. They may be 70s gear, but the 70s were a kind decade to me. The 80s yielded horrible workout clothes like those awful nylon Dolphin shorts that refuse to yield to gravity. Welcome to Wedgie City.

There is also nothing I love better than a big sloppy T-shirt straight out of my husband’s drawer. My days of a sleek abdomen and chest that could pass the so-called “pencil test” are long over, and quite frankly, I’m glad. I don’t miss the five times a week that I had to head to the student gymnasium and lap pool to fit into my size five pants. I don’t miss having to fight over a Lifecycle that I signed up for. I don’t miss having to drag my tired self off the weight bench to make way for impatient bodybuilders getting ready for competition when I just want five more seconds to let my muscles recover. I have a “low-maintenance” two-baby figure, thank you very much.

I still go to a local gym, and I still get about three workouts a week, sometimes four, but they are a little less superhuman in content and pace. I have naturally “big” legs that gain girth too easily, whether it’s fat or muscle, or some totally awkward combination of the two. I come from a whole family of women with great big calf muscles. Even when I was a skinny teenager (and too young and stupid to appreciate it), I used to bust the seams of my tapered jeans, right along the calf, whenever I would stoop down to pick up a book that I dropped. Those tapered jeans weren’t kind to “well-endowed” sorts like me. (The ones without back pockets weren’t kind to women who had a “well-endowed” caboose back then, either, and they automatically endowed it even if you weren’t all that well-fleshed back there to begin with.) Thankfully, childbirth didn’t ruin my calves, and they’re one of my only parts that didn’t end up with a lattice work of stretch marks (just one or two from doing calf presses) as the end result. I don’t even want to talk about what having kids did to my stomach. It hasn’t seen the light of day via crop top or low-slung jeans in over five years. Think of it as the other place where “the sun don’t shine.”

I enjoy a good run on a day when there aren’t too many people around me on the neighboring treadmills. If I make the mistake of eating too hearty a meal beforehand, at least I can pass gas quietly in peace (It’s called a “lactic acid buildup,” fear it.). At least I’m not the only one, I’ve certainly been “downwind” of other people hoping that I wasn’t close enough to them to notice. I also don’t want anyone to hear me wheezing away like the Little Engine that Couldn’t after I hit fifteen minutes, the official halfway point of my combined walk/jog. There’s nothing worse than reaching that point of exhaustion when you do any of the following:

1. You get a stitch in your side,
2. You feel the beginnings of shin splints (you feel like they’ll actually splinter, and hence the name; better yet, you’ll NEED a splint once you’re done), and
3. You’re swiping at your forehead with your shoulder, pretending to windmill your arms over your head as you run to make it look like it’s not killing you.

Then someone that you outweigh by thirty pounds and who knows how many fat grams hops on the machine next to you, keys in a speed of 7.5 or higher miles per hour, and begins their workout at an all-out dead run. They even have the nerve to key in an INCLINE of five percent. And they INCREASE the speed by another half a mile per hour halfway through. Just so I don’t look like a complete sissy, I am always compelled to tap up my speed button by a wimpy two hundredths of a mile. It gets worse when I get a glimpse of myself in the weight room mirrors across the room from me and actually see my stride. I look stupid when I jog. Gumby looks cooler when he runs, and he’s made of green clay. My arms are flopping all over the place, my hands refuse to stay “tea-cupped” gracefully to avoid clenching my fists. (My track coach in high school would faint away in embarrassment if he could see me now.) My hands start doing that thing that people’s hands do that aren’t accustomed to running regularly (just madly slapping the air) when they are forced to trot across a busy street when they get the walk light. If I didn’t have such a sense of humor about the whole thing, I would probably just walk, except I can walk for 45 minutes and only burn around 425 calories. I can walk and jog on and off and burn off those same calories in around 35 minutes. If I can stumble off the treadmill ten minutes sooner, which am I going to choose?

I won’t touch a Stairmaster anymore, either. My backside was never my biggest problem (or my biggest body part), even if it doesn’t ride as high as it used to. I still won’t turn it into rock hard booty-us maximus on that Stairmaster for the sake of tighter calves or reducing the cellulite on the backs of my thighs. The Stairmaster is for women who want that nicely rounded “apple” of a backside that you can set a drink on. You can also get Stairmaster wrist from leaning forward too far on the handlebars on those things, anyway. As if that wasn’t bad enough, don’t forget the ever-popular charlie horse that you get in your quadriceps (you know, that boulder-like set of muscles that ends up making your knees look backwards when they get too big) after staying on it too long. The Stairmaster isn’t for women who already have big calves. It’s for women who complain to themselves and anyone else who will listen, “I hate my legs, they’re too skinny.” You lucky thing, you. Perhaps I can interest you in some tapered jeans that I can’t get one foot into…literally. The only thing I have against skinny legs is that I don’t currently have them.

I have to muster all of my energy and nerve to hit the gym. I am not a steam room nudist, either. There is a sign on the door to our steam room that says that wearing no clothes is considered “proper etiquette” for using the wet steam sauna. I’ll just have to stick with being an unschooled heathen, I guess. I go to the gym in whatever I am going to wear, and I leave it wearing precisely the same clothes. I wear my T-shirt and underwear with a towel wrapped around my less-attractive half into the steam room or dry sauna. I have a very reliable one-piece Speedo suit that gives me full coverage of my caboose when I use the lap pool. I swim after the sun has gone down, and I don’t linger by the poolside once I have finished my laps. I almost can’t believe that I was a habitual sunbather once upon a time. I’m also bashful in the locker room when it comes to talking to anyone in a state of full or partial undress, too. I guess it would be bad form to tell them what time it is with my hand over my eyes, but I’m sorely tempted. The female body is a beautiful thing in its variety of shapes, but it’s like trying not to stare at the scene of an accident when you are in the close quarters of a locker room, and someone asks you how the water was, or if the main cardio room is still crowded.

Some women aren’t satisfied with showing just off in the locker room, either. My gym has a lot of college students and high schoolers that go there to work out or train for their sport. I see women in the weight room wearing the next best thing to club gear and enough hair spray to clog a HEPA filter. It’s amazing how impractical exercise clothes have grown in the past few years. The little teenagers will come in wearing itty bitty nylon short-shorts (of the “Who wears short-shorts?” variety), little cotton spaghetti-strapped tank tops (I presume that they are the ones with the built-in bra, because miraculously, their straps don’t show), bell-bottomed hip-hugger workout pants, or sports bras that look like a torture device. They also seem to love boxer shorts that somehow never ride up. It must be nice to have inner thighs that don’t rub together. What really amuses me (you can tell that there are quite a few things that DO here) are the women who look like they go to Hawaiian Tropic competitions that actually tease their hair and put on a full face of makeup. They often add a little sun visor or a backwards baseball cap (it’s like a uniform) with a few locks of hair tousled just so from over the brim, or with wispy bangs that flirt with people through the hat size adjuster. A lot of them just seem to go straight from the tanning booth into the weight room to bench press two-thirds of the weight stack like it’s nothing. I try not to look too envious over in the corner with my spit-in-the-ocean-sized fifteen-pound dumbbells. I just keep my lower lip clenched between my teeth to keep from poking it out in a pout, thinking, “Well, I love having kids and a day job, or I’d look like that too.”

One of these days, my kids may even show my current photos to their fiancÃ?©es (when they’re at least thirty, I hope) and say “This was Mom back when she was skinny and cute.” Until then, I keep going to the gym, adjusting my shorts so they aren’t twisted around my thigh and hidden by my shirt, and tugging my shirt away from the sweat spot that glued it into a bunched up lump under my ribcage. I may get back some semblance of cuteness by working out, but I’ll never look cool doing it.