Saturday, June 17, 2006

Making Judy Jetson blush?


It’s Storytelling Saturday...and this is how I roll

Once upon a time...

Back in the pre-Stairmaster days of yore—when the standard gym looked more like a cave than Studio 54—Arnold may have already been Mr. Olympia several times over but there probably weren’t more than a couple of dozen people who could pronounce “Schwarzenegger” without consulting Hooked on Phonics. Let’s face it, when Bobby Fischer was the nation’s athletic ideal, it was clearly time for a fitness revolution.

Fast-forward to the twenty-first century and a health club on every corner. This time around the revolution was televised and joining a gym has become a post-modern rite of passage. You plunk down the plastic and get ready to navigate your way through enough computers and machines to make Judy Jetson blush.

Welcome to my world…

An upscale health club is one place where the different classes meet and mingle. Any personal trainer worth his or her supplements craves an elite clientele. Conversely, their well-heeled customers wield their buff buns and ripped deltoids like post-modern status symbols. Trainers and clients are from different worlds…sometimes at odds but often in synch. Their relationships are a complex and unique offshoot of a society in which the top 1 percent of Americans own wealth equal to the bottom 95 percent. But in the gym, you can’t use your stock portfolio to get through a tough set of lunges…that’s what us trainers are for.

Who else wants to spin a yarn?

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P.S. June is International Expendable Writing Month. I’m writing a personal trainer memoir...how about you?

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Posted on 06/17 at 06:47 AM
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