The Kingdom of the Locker Room

The locker room in my gym is a place of utilitarian necessity to me. I go there to change, to store my purse and other accessories, and sometimes catch a startled glance at myself in the vast array of mirrors placed at every possible vantage point. I have learned some things about the citizens of the locker room. Allow me to introduce them to you.

Queen Selfie: Her royal courts are the locker room. She is found, wearing impossibly cute workout gear, hair perfectly pulled back under a thick, multi-colored headbands, in full makeup, ready to workout. Her warm-ups begin in the locker room and include raising and lowering her arms, smart phone in hand and clicking away, for the first round of the pre-workout selfies she will publish to social media before stepping out of the locker room. 

She continues her warm ups by moving from mirror to mirror and taking more pictures, mooshing her mouth into duck lips in one, smiling brilliantly in another, then finishes with a sad faced little girl pout in the last.  Once in the gym, she sits on the recumbent bike, motionless except for the zealous movement of those fingers, tagging herself in her pictures and captioning them that she is a "gym beast". Her workout is over once she’s received the tribute of responses from her followers and she heads back to the locker room, wearied but with a sense of accomplishment, to add a few more post exercise selfies to her albums.

Houdini: She is so modest she prefers to change in one of the few restroom stalls or showers. If those are occupied, though, she accomplishes a feat of agility so extreme it is praiseworthy. It unfolds like this. She sits on a bench in her professional attire that includes skirt, blouse, and jacket. Then she swathes several towels around herself so that only her head and her legs below the knees are visible. After a few mysteriously furious movements under her towels, she throws them off and emerges completely clad in her gym wear, without having exposed one additional centimeter of skin.

 Eve: The polar opposite of Houdini, she dries herself in the shower and steps out, sans towel, sans everything, to style her hair and put on her makeup in the buff. She takes her time, so comfortable in her middle aged skin that surely everyone else must be comfortable with it, too. She eschews personal space boundaries and gregariously approaches people seated on the bench to share a joke or professional observation, her pendulous private bits in close proximity to the faces of those ensnared in her conversations.

Oversharer: She is always accompanied by a twin oversharer. They loudly recount their escapades of the night or weekend before with each other. The twins amplify their voices to such a level that no one has to resort to eavesdropping.  Their vivid descriptions are replete with names, details, and bodily embarrassments. Once outside the locker room, though, they mumble their names so unintelligibly to the workers at the desk they have to be asked to repeat themselves.

Regular, Everyday Sweaters: This would include myself and most of the other citizens of the gym. We're a motley crew, indeed, but anyone who is willing to inflict pain and discomfort upon themselves and drip sweat in the process has to have some good things going on.

I Have a Sickness...

And this isn't even all of them. 

I love working out, and I love shoes, so this is the inevitable collision of those two worlds. There's not much I am obsessive about, but this might qualify. What about you? Do you have a mild obsession with anything? (And the floor isn't dirty, but my phone camera is not the best.)

Shelly's Laws of the Gym (With Apologies to Murphy)

I go to my gym on a university campus five or six times a week. I enjoy it. However, like Murphy's Law, there are several, irrefutable laws that hold true each time.

1. The Sweat Flinger Law: This mandate was specifically written to ensure the man who sweats the most profusely will, in a row of empty machines, end up next to you and will be sweating so exuberantly that his sweat droplets cascade upon you like salty rain.

2. The Racing Woman Law: An intriguing piece of legislation, this calls for a woman, preferably no older than 19, who is speedy and in incredible shape, to notice each time you head to the track to run your 3.5 miles. She will then immediately stop what she is doing, head to the track after you to race you without your knowledge or consent. The law stipulates she must exert herself as if she is overtaking Usain Bolt, even though it is only the two of you on the track. A provision in the law allows you to award her a medal for repeatedly showing up a middle aged woman on the track, if you so choose.


3. The Familiar Audience Law: The beauty of this law is it guarantees that ONLY when your trainer has pushed you to the brink of death and you are whimpering with exhaustion that a group of college students who used to be your middle school students will take places in the bleachers next to the court where you are doing the last set of boot camp exercises to watch because they are so happy to have found you at the gym. A last minute rider gives bonus points if they also shout encouragement and applaud while the last vestiges of your dignity evaporate as you complete a plank exercise your trainer calls, "humping the floor" .

4. The Annoying Flirty Man Law: This law dictates that Annoying Flirty Man will continue to pelt you with his attention, even though you clearly wear your wedding ring, you do not speak to him, you do not make eye contact with him, nor do you even acknowledge his existence as you run on the treadmill. An added bonus of this law includes the man must wear tank tops and have a forest of hair peeking out of the collar and arm holes.

5. The Towel Assimilation Law: Years of unregulated towel usage necessitated this legislation. The mandate covers those times when you drop your gym issued blue towel, identical to all the other blue towels issued, beside your mat as you work on core exercises. It requires other users of the area to plop their sweat soaked towels in a pile with your towel and ignore the vast open spaces near their own mats where towels could be segregated. When you reach behind your head for your towel without looking, it ensures you will also grab the other wet towels with your own. An amendment also allows for people with the same brand bottles of water as yours, partially filled, to place their bottles so near yours that it is impossible to distinguish one from the other.

Do you have irrefutable laws of life that govern your life?