This gym caters to all walks of life, but coming from gyms located in Hanover Park and Macomb, there are certain elements that caught me off guard.
Most prominently, are yuppies. As it turns out, World Gym is crawling with them. It makes sense, but not being a full-blown yuppy convert yet, I'm startled in their presence.
For instance, if you were a member of any Greek organization in college, the gym is now the only place in which it is not only acceptable to wear one of your dozens of BS bar crawl, barn dance and date-rape night shirts, but it is required.
Another thing is the homeless people. I jogged on a treadmill facing the large glass-plated wall and watched as homeless person after homeless person walked by me, looking in. A thought occured to me- Here I am, laboriously panting away on a machine that a great deal of money was spent for me to be able to use, to burn off the excess fat I accumulate by having too much food to eat at every meal. Meanwhile, these people are walking by wishing they had enough food at any meal, and certainly don't need to run on a machine to burn off any excess weight. As I wipe sweat from my face, I notice too, that they are probably freezing, and I feel like stepping outside to cool off. Perspective.
On a much lighter note, we have Yoga. There isn't yoga in Hanover Park. Like art, penicillin, and tipping, it hasn't reached that part of the world yet. I am always up for trying new things, and truthfully rather enjoyed certain parts of the class, but a few observations:
Yoga moves/poses/takedowns have ridiculous names. It seems as though a child (child's pose) tore out pages of their coloring book and inserted them into a martial arts book. That said, I could have done better. Here is my formula for naming a yoga pose- [Awkward Adjective + Funny Animal = Yoga pose]
Some examples...
Relevant Elephant, Starving Pelican, Eager Beaver, Reluctant Moose, Indifferent Aardvark.
All yoga instructors are in incredible shape, and talk the same. Not just in the things they actually say, "Honor your hamstrings", "Have an attitude of gratitude", etc. but seriously, the tone of their voices sounds the same, like an accent all of its own. Take a valley girl accent, and add lazy but grateful and you have a yoga instructor's accent.
I was the only guy in the class, go figure, and likely also the only one desperately trying to hold in a fart for the duration. In fact, I disallowed myself from entering deeper levels of relaxation to avoid losing control of my sphincter. Gyms have bad gas odors from all of the protein and fiber-fed men pushing hundreds of pounds of weight around. At this desperate moment I actually wished I was doing squat-thrusts, just to be accepted. If I farted here, I would be ripping people from their nearly dream state of appreciation for their bodies and the universe, and humiliating myself. On the floor, if I fart, guys barely notice. If they did, it would only be to acknowledge the level of hard work I'm putting into my regimen.
On a final note, some yoga is fucking hard. I broke a sweat doing planks, and when the instructor cooed in her yoga voice for us to return to downward-facing dog, a wave of relief swept over me like nothing before.
