I know Vassar is kind of split up into two factions just like a bad YA novel: The Athletes and the…“well, I’ve been meaning to exercise more, I’ve just been suuuuuper busy and I walk a lot around campus, isn’t that enough?” I’ve often found myself flip-flopping between these superfluous categories. I dance, but I don’t do it well, but I do pilates, but my balance sucks and I’m constantly five seconds away from falling over, but I do boxing, but I’ve missed a ton of classes because I’ve just been suuuuuper busy. But this summer, I decided to flip flop and stick the landing. I joined a gym.
My relationship with working out is much like my relationship with the French indie rock band Phoenix: We started out in high school and we’ve been on and off since then, although usually when I’m feeling super sad, it’ll breathe a new vigor into our dynamic. When I was younger, I was obsessed with getting visible abs, until I realized that that’s actually impossible and abdominal muscles are a myth created by Big Fitness in order to sell you protein shakes. My version of exercise was doing Blogilates and Yoga with Adriene videos on the floor of my bedroom. I loved it because it was private and peaceful. I was scared to go to a gym because I didn’t want to ruin this beautiful thing I had cultivated.
But summer of 2024 was SO! BORING! I’ve written a little bit about what it was like to live and grow up in southern Ohio, but it’s something that you truly can’t understand unless you’re actually there. Rows and rows and rows of corn. Not a person in sight. Except for my friend Hana, who suggested that we instead use this time to embody Meg Thee Stallion and procure a “hot girl summer,” as they say. But unlike the NBA, we couldn’t just pick anyone in town by slapping a huge baseball cap on them. We had to do a little careful scouting.
The first gym we went to was an Esporta that my dad used to play racquetball at. I should’ve taken that as a warning sign: At every turn, Hana and I would run into one of my dad’s many, many friends and be subject to a barrage of questions (“How’s college? What are you majoring in again? Film? So you’re going to make YouTube videos?”) When we did our cardio (Hana on the treadmill, me on the elliptical), one of the guys on the treadmills next to her was running so hard and fast that the ground beneath us was vibrating. Can you guess how that ended? At least when he fell, he didn’t get injured—and Hana and I decided that Esporta was not the pick for us. We could hand them off to the Cavaliers.
Our second fitness endeavor was a Barre class. I was vaguely attracted to Barre because of its promises of making me more flexible and agile, one of the primary reasons I wanted to work out in the first place. As soon as we entered the studio, we were immediately ambushed by a horde of white middle-aged women, clad in matching grip socks. “Hana!” I shouted out to her as we hung from the ceiling to avoid the stampede. “As two women of color in regular socks, will we be allowed to Barre?!” Hana reassured me: “Fret not! We will simply wow them with our prowess.” After we removed the twigs from our hair, Hana and I actually enjoyed the class. It was just the two of us and our instructor, and several of the movements were things I was familiar with from dance and Pilates. At the end of the session, the instructor excitedly informed us that our fee for the remainder of the classes was approximately $5,638,249. Hana and I promptly pliéed our way out of there.
But then we realized that the answer was in front of us the whole time: Planet Fitness. I had always been put off by PF’s passive-aggressive marketing tactics of branding themselves as “not a gym,” but instead some sort of mythical, otherworldly, purple and yellow realm. Hana and I were pleasantly surprised to find out that Planet Fitness did not require any prior knowledge of astronomy. Our experience there was super chill—there was a ton of equipment for us to experiment with and we could try out different weight routines, plus the people there were sweet and mostly kept to themselves. We ended up going to Planet Fitness two to three times every week over the summer, which was a much-needed respite from our summer jobs and internships. Overall, my workout experience this summer was pretty nice, and joining a gym turned out to be great. Although I am a bit traumatized by treadmills now.