It just amazes me the extent to which this going to the gym thing has caught on with me again.
The latest episode in the series began when I felt the real need for better balance in my daily activities, like pulling on my socks while standing, and looked around Youtube for advice to folks over 60. The choice of clips was limited, but I soon started viewing the simple demonstrations of how to work from a chair, bending, reaching, and finding my center again. That was November last year, and it all occurred while I was dealing, long-distance, with my mother’s rapid decline in health, and this new concentration on my own needs proved very useful.
Soon, after feeling a marked improvement in many ways, I found myself inquiring about joining health clubs in the neighborhood. After doing my shopping, I joined a brand-new one very nearby, for a month’s trial, just to see how I would endure. I loved it, and signed for six more months. I renewed again in June for a year. They now consider me there as part of the furniture, and introduce me to newcomers as “Gregoreeeeee, who is here practically every day.”
I’m not new to the gym thing. I’ve been in and out of locker rooms and fitness centers since my memory can recall. When I was training musically and preparing to go to Brazil to perform ‘Don Quichotte,’ I joined a municipally-run club here in Paris for several months to get my activity level back up, anticipating those upcoming swordfights, dancing on tables, leaps, and future climbs on to and off from horses: the usual singer things. I worked with a trainer, was feeling great with it all by the end, but that was four years ago now. And I think I showed them down in São Paulo how limber the old man was.
I’ve joined clubs over the years in New York City, memorably the Paris Health Club on West End Avenue. I’ve heard the place has changed drastically now. I loved it, back in the day: it had a pool, the weight lifting room of course, and was where I first heard of Pilates, which I’ve still never tried. And I’m recalling how it was near so many fun restaurants in the neighborhood…
Before that, I recall spending every morning one marvelous summer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, while singing the Commendatore in ‘Don Giovanni,’ training outdoors with a guy named Doug. He had me running laps on the track to get used to the altitude (which I never did get used to), crunching my abdominals on benches outdoors, and working with weight training indoors, and he taught me a lot about nutrition, in that Mecca of healthy lifestyles. Some of it even stuck.
I can also recall joining up here in the 80s for Aerobic classes, when everyone in the world seemed to be mindlessly jumping up and down wearing pastel-colored tights. The place was called Espace Vit’Halles, so I suppose it deserved to be phased out, since I hate bad puns.
Back in Boston, I must have been one of the first members of the European Health Spa, a high-end outfit set up on Mass Avenue. Mike was my trainer, dressed in a clinical white outfit, like in a commercial for toothpaste. He actually did give me the best guidance imaginable for all the enormous machines and free weights at my disposal. Those were the 70s, so at night I was seen hanging around the discos, probably hoping to meet John Travolta, then in the morning working at the Café Vendôme as backup cook, or at the grill, or as barman on Tuesday afternoons, and occasionally washing dishes, too. Learning music, rehearsing opera scenes and practicing must have been squeezed in there somehow, I guess. How I relished those years, and what a great time it was to be “Stayin’ Alive.”
Before that, I was required to take sports at my liberal arts program at SUNY Geneseo, so had morning classes in swimming, which I enjoyed, and also took a couple of semesters of Modern Dance. Nijinsky I was not, but I developed a real appreciation for the art which has followed me everywhere.
As an adolescent, I was sent to summer camp at Camp Sam Wood, on Conesus Lake, despite my protestations. But I actually looked forward to performing the morning jumping jacks, and didn’t ever want to stop. It was all the rest about summer camp I despised.
It’s ironic to me, in retrospect, that I had such an aversion to gym class in Junior High School that I would invent all kinds of reasons to not be there. Many Tuesday afternoons I was found lying down to “rest” in nurse Mary Palone’s clinic, timed skillfully to avoid the days we were climbing ropes and playing “shirts versus skins” volleyball. Mrs. Palone seemed to understand, and my cot was always waiting.
If mine (l’Orange Bleu Les Halles) is an example, gyms are the safest, cleanest places to be these days. And the only place I can think of nowadays where one is not required to wear a mask! The machines are extremely well spaced apart, fear thee not. What a relief for me to learn recently that the owner of my club has just obtained a last-minute derogation to remain open for certain members, despite the stupid new two-week shutdown of all gyms in France for Covid. The exceptions shall include either 1) those members qualifying as high-level athletes or 2) those who are under continuing training in preparation for competition. Didier, the shrewd owner, included me on the list of “exceptional athletes!” He winkingly announced the news to me Sunday night just before closing, when he discovered me, alone, doing some ridiculously strenuous chest exercises in front of the mirrors. In this improbable situation, we laughingly agreed that there must be somehow that even I could be considered high-level… perhaps in some special category, like age!
I’m truly happy to be going in often, more motivated than ever before. Of course it’s for the mental as well as the physical benefits. What I’ve learned is that self-image is always in flux, and in many ways I feel better about my person than I was able to feel about myself at the age of 29. My grandmother once said to me, “Too soon old, too late smart!” She didn’t actually say it, but it was written in Gothic German lettering on her Scotch tape dispenser. I asked her if it’s true, and she promised me that yes, it’s absolutely true!
Just trying to be my personal best, today and as always, and in fact I sometimes do even feel like I’m 29. Well, maybe not quite so much, first thing in the morning…