In the beginning of this story, the sun hasn’t come up yet — it’s dark out and it’s very cold. In fact, there’s a blizzard and I am walking up a hill. I am eighteen years old and it takes sixteen minutes to walk from my dormitory to the gym where we have our 5am lift.
Half of the other wrestlers are changing in the locker room when I get in. I remember that. I remember brushing the snow off my shoulders and unwrapping the thick scarf around my neck. And I remember looking at my buddy Dale and saying something like “when I finish college, I’m moving somewhere warm and I’m never walking into a weight room again.”
That’s the way I remember it. I suppose I probably used more profanity — for emphasis. But anyway, my notion of totally abandoning weight rooms after college (and after wrestling) turned out to be a lie.
Or maybe it didn’t. Since I left college, I’ve joined three different gyms, but I wouldn’t call any of them weight rooms. They are rooms with weights, but they are not weight rooms.
A weight room is a certain sort of place. It’s different from a gym. A gym smells like exercise equipment, a weight room smells like cold iron and sweat. A gym is a nice airy space, but in a weight room, the ceilings are so low, they can occasionally trigger claustrophobia.
You can be comfortable in a gym. You cannot be comfortable in a weight room. If you’re comfortable in a weight room, you’re doing it wrong.
And why does this distinction matter? I suppose it doesn’t, but then again, it does in the bird’s-eye view of life. In the long run, I quite like the gym. I never intend to go back to the weight room. And this role of #DadInTheGym is exactly what I imagined when I told Dale I was moving somewhere warm and abandoning weight rooms.
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