Beyond Measure. Rachel Z. Arndt
on? The relativity of the gym demands careful record-keeping, a supposedly objective take on reality that winnows down the subject into numerals in the name of progress: Let go of identity for the sake of the body and its mechanized system of levers and pulleys and other simple machines mirrored in the gym equipment.
The couple follows the trainer downstairs, the bro floor with no cardio machines, only racks of weights and men in T-shirts that have the sleeves cut off to draw pecs into sharp relief against bright billowing cotton. The trainer keeps turning to make sure the pair is still behind him.
A man on the other side of the stairs pulls at his shorts.
Another man plugs his headphones into his phone, the cord running up his shirt, pressed between synthetic fabric and sweat-slicked skin.
A woman pulls at her leggings.
Split into frames by glass panels, exercisers duplicate in mirrors and grow to a mass, to a metal-on-metal ringing. They hold their bodies relative to the others and compare. They keep this comparison secret but will copy movements the next day, spaced by time. The main thing is to grimace: Lips touch so sweat doesn’t get in the mouth, and sweat pools above the top lip until there’s too much and the drip drips from lips to rubber floor. The rubber floor absorbs the hit of barbells and says oomph at the end of a set when men cannot bear to hold on to the weights long enough to place them on the floor and so just let them go.
This is the privilege of leisure time.
A map of this place could be points of avoidance: where I stop walking toward the same machine as the man in the paisley bandanna headband because I notice his water bottle holding his spot; where I wait for someone to finish on the tricep pull-down machine, rope taut in his callused hands, and practice the look of not waiting. Some knees part away from each other and others are held apart by thighs like trunks, which is to say developed.
The gym’s windows were made to hold the bodies out of reach but to hold them nevertheless. I try not to look too long. I let the rubber bear the breathing and the illusion of progress. I try to steer my attention toward the future body, more beautiful and more a specimen than the current version. But really I just want to stay the same. Sometimes the click of tendons on shoulder blades is enough.
A laminated paper sign at the top of the stairs announces the arrival of “gym wipes”: Once there were black terry-cloth towels and now there are disposable alcohol-coated paper towels in a dispenser that doesn’t have quite enough tension to let the perforations break. We never meant for the towels to be used for sweat on the body, the signs say.
Sometimes someone above walks by in dots, a body turned low-res by the hole-punched metal wall. Each ass-out squat of the man squatting puts the man on the verge of losing control, his body lurching against itself like a trembling outboard motor, starting cord tugged successfully, smoke thinning over the lake.
Modern fitness comes from desk jobs and disco and heart health and dieting. It comes too, before that, from photography and war. Magazines at the turn of the twentieth century popularized the image of the superhuman strongman, with his thick neck and gladiator sandals and barrel chest. Then came wars, then the Cold War, when American presidents fretted about “soft,” feminine American men. Eisenhower established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness in 1956. Four years later, Kennedy wrote in Sports Illustrated that “the magnitude of our dangers makes the physical fitness of our citizens a matter of increasing importance.” Ever since, US presidents have worried about an unfit citizenry, testing kids in school to make sure that they hit benchmarks and, it seems, based on the lack of progress, to validate these presidents’ worries.
Meanwhile, Americans took to fitness on their own. Less often at the factory, more often at desks, workers with leisure time noticed their suited bodies turning mushy. Fitness could give powerful men the bodies of powerful men, and, the corporate thinking went, it could actually make them more powerful. Exercising, and having the world know you exercise, became morally virtuous. If you could control nothing else in your life, at least you could control your body. People performed health in the private public of gyms, turning it into an individual pursuit, with proof of each person’s willingness to give over leisure time to self-improvement evident in the most public of spaces: the body. The gym was the factory and in it, machines, like the machines of regular factories, replicated human movements. But in these new factories, the workers were the product and the consumer at once.
I never like to admit I use the elliptical. It’s a women’s machine, I’m told, both explicitly and by all the women on all the ellipticals, hair flopping in sync with the beaten cyclical orbits that move less like Earth’s and more like Pluto’s. Per the standard thinking, because women use ellipticals more than men do, ellipticals are considered lesser—less real, maybe, or just less difficult. The number of calories burned, according to the elliptical (an estimate at best, like all machines’, but a number nevertheless), suggests otherwise. The movement does too: Each step comes with a punch forward, a pull back, arms connected to poles connected to foot paddles, a bad bow-and-arrow imitation. The heels gently tap in the downswing, the legs like tongs.
Lines of ellipticals, lines of treadmills, bicycles, stair climbers, each front row prime real estate because it faces the windows—the windows the street, its gray cracked concrete that makes every car sound like it has a flat tire—and not the hamstrings and calves of the going-nowhere orbiters in front. The word “machine” is anathema to the idea of these machines; they are supposed to reproduce the natural, real activity so closely—some of the bicycles even have videogame courses that require steering and gear shifting—that users won’t notice they’re not going anywhere. On the treadmill, there is everything but forward motion and the task of passing other people on the sidewalk, deciding whether to weave right or left around another body, steps softening, momentarily, so as not to alarm anyone. On the stair climbers there are real stairs. On every machine, including the bastard elliptical, what’s replicated most closely, though, is yesterday’s stint on the same machine. Motivation turns muddy: If you’re not at the gym because you can’t be outside, moving in the real world, then why are you there?
On my way to the elliptical in the front left corner, five machines from the nearest exerciser, I see someone I know and consider exit strategies: the opposite direction, toward the upper deck of the pool, around the staircase, down the staircase, toward the stationary bikes, darting toward the weights and skipping the elliptical altogether—which I try for, but she does too, sees me, asks, What’s up? and I point to my iPod clipped to my T-shirt hem and mumble some nonsense, after pretending I hadn’t yet noticed her, about being in a Beyoncé zone. She smiles, as eager to end the conversation as I, zigzags past me, waves goodbye as she bounds down the steps, away.
Around me, around the elliptical I muscle into motion, drops of sweat gather on the floor, as if the rubber itself were perspiring. I can’t hear myself breathe over my music playing through noise-canceling headphones except when the seal between ear canal and earbud cracks open, loosened by moisture. I notice slowly, mostly by feel, then by sound: the creak of the machine every time my right foot comes forward, my breath on the downbeat, the foot-on-plastic of the overzealous runner who kicks the hollow front of the treadmill on each gazelle spring into the same place.
As exercisers multiplied, so did gyms and so did equipment: To barbells and dumbbells were added weightlifting machines, which narrowed each exercise down into a simple movement, the bench press becoming a seated push forward, the squat becoming recliner-based. By connecting the lifter to the weights with cables, and by seating the lifter in an apparatus that allowed only specific movements, a machine could keep the body controlled. It could hold the body in place. It was the modern gym itself, writ small.
Machines for cardiovascular exercise popped up too, bringing running indoors, to the treadmill, on which distance and time were complemented with new metrics: calories, METs, watts—metrics that grew more arbitrary the more of them there were.
Next came fitness classes. People lined up in rows and columns like aerobics machines, faced mirrors instead of windows, and formed, willingly, into a panopticon. At the spinning classes I used to go to, at six thirty in the morning, often I was one of only two or three participants. As the teacher barked commands and encouragement—Climb