Fitties

I'm concerned about the mental state of my personal trainer...

Okay, he's not really my personal trainer. He's a just a personal trainer with whom my lovely wife and I had a fitness consultation this past week. After which I told him I'd think about the whole personal trainer thing...by which I meant I'd do my best to awkwardly avoid him every time I saw him around the gym, because there is now way I'm paying some guy forty dollars A SESSION to torture me.


That leads me to my point quite nicely though. As I said, I'm very worried about this man's mental stability. I know what it's like to have a job where all your customers hate you. It can be really taxing. However, this relentlessly upbeat gentleman didn't flinch once as I starred at him from the ground with a look that clearly said "I'm thinking about tying you down and feeding your entrails to street cats while you're still alive". What he did seem to find unbelievable was that, until a month ago, my wife and I had not worked out on any sort of regular basis for the last few years.

In fact, he's not the first one I've noticed with this particular psychosis. The man who sold us our gym membership seemed pretty surprised as well. "Fitness is important" he kept reminding us, as our brains worked double time trying to figure out if thirty-five dollars a month was a worthwhile price.

It's not that I disagree with him. Fitness is great. Nothing beats coming home from work and not being so tired that all I want to do is eat a chocolate-covered deep-fried cheeseburger and pass out.
That's great. What troubles me is that these gentlemen seem to think that the world consists entirely of people like them. They think that fitness really is the most important thing. This issue leads to a vast overestimation of their value both to myself and to society. Thirty dollars a month is doable, but all that does is get me in the door. I think that some amount of personal training should come with that. All the thirty dollars really gets me is access to a room full of heavy things. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Wal-Mart doesn't have an entry fee and I can pick up anything I like there. Sure, people will look at me funny when I'm doing chin-ups on the gun racks in sporting goods, but hell, it's Wal-Mart, they've seen worse.

I am paying that cost for the gym. Why? Well, it really is nice and I do feel good about myself when I leave. I will not, however, be paying for a personal trainer. I would wager that there are prostitutes with better rates who offer a far more comprehensive service package than this man is prepared to give me or I am prepared to accept from him. No one is worth that kind of money for an hour session. I don't care if I come out of it looking like Jon Hamm, that'll just mean one more workout as I move all my stuff out of my apartment because I've been blowing my rent money on physical fitness.

What really kills me about the situation is how blown away these "fitties" are to my apathy toward physical fitness. They seem to think it's the end all be all. Christ guys, it's not cable or internet! Their reactions to my attitude are gasps of shock and awe. You know what everybody else in my life has said when Alicia and I announced we were joining a gym? Either "Why?" or "That's really expensive.". Both of those are perfectly reasonable. Well, why is a little cynical, but I digress. The world is not going to end if I get fat, or if I mess up my ankle, or if sit on my ass all day. A large portion of the population is not at the gym right now, nor will they be in the near future.



GASP!

And it isn't that they don't want to be fit. I would venture to guess most people feel better when they're fit. It's because they are doing just fine without a gym. This is a case in which, for most people, the cost far outweighs the gain. Paying thirty bucks a month to wander aimlessly around a room full of heavy things until you finally hurt yourself and stop is not a priority for most people. You fitties charge criminal amounts to go hang out somewhere you would be anyway and tell people what to do. Hell, I'd do that for free. I don't mean to be disparaging, nor do I want anyone to be offended, but if you all dropped dead from excessive fitness right now, the world would keep turning. Lower your rates, pull your heads out of your asses, then we'll talk about the importance of physical fitness.