Yesterday afternoon at the gym, the Y-owned nylon dip belt was missing. I searched the whole entire fitness floor--because people not returning things to wear they are supposed to be kept is a whole nother problem--and it was just gone. I can only surmise that it was either stolen, broken, or put somewhere totally inexplicable like, I dunno, the locker room, the pool, or the basketball court. This effed with my planned workout. I was not pleased. And it came to me like a message from on high*** that these things are probably fairly inexpensive and that I should just buy my own and never get irritated by its disappearance again.
You know what else is always disappearing at my Y?
The oly bar collars. At one time--maybe a year ago?--we had 8 pair, most of which were brand new. We're down to two now. Two. And one pair is kinda wonky. So six pair were stolen? Really? Because what the hell do people do with them at home? If you have an oly bar set-up and a rack in your house, why are you lifting at the Y? And if you have an oly bar set-up and a rack in your house, you've spent hundreds of dollars for them. You can afford to buy a $9 set of collars I'm sure. I've tried to envision some kind of deviant sexual purpose people would be stealing those mothers for but even my warped imagination is not up to it. So, seriously, people, wtf? I am, again, almost tempted to buy myself my own set of collars to bring to the gym but someone would probably take them off my bar when I went to the bubbler for twenty seconds to refill my water.
Plus, there's a limit to how much crap a person can reasonably expected to haul to the gym. Especially on the bus. I already bring my workout journal and pen, LiquidGrip, iPod, water bottle, usually my Kindle Fire, sometimes my yoga mat, very occasionally a bathing suit and flipflops, gym clothes (if I'm not already wearing them of course), just enough grooming implements to ensure I'm not skeery when I'm leaving, one of my supplements I take immediately post lifting, and--after Friday if Amazon comes through--my dip belt. I really do not want to swap out my gym bag for a suitcase, kwim?
Does this shit happen at your gyms, readers, or is my beloved ghetto Y just blessed with a particularly sticky-fingered or irresponsible crowd? And do you haul an unconscionable amount of equipment with you to the gym?
xoxo
***hey, you have your religious experiences and I'll have mine
We have 4 weight rooms at my Y and as you can imagine equipment gets borrowed from one to another. Also the new machines have cheap hand grips and bars so people bring their favourite grips from one room to their favourite machine in another. This Y is 5 floors high so its a trip to get things straightened out. Actually the buildings center piece is the massive stairs that runs bottom to top of the building.
ReplyDeleteI work out at a commercial gym - not one of the shiny chain gyms, a local place - and we have the same problem with collars. Like you said, they're not very expensive, so why don't they just put a pair at each barbell station? I wrote a review of this gym on Yelp a while back and complained about the collar issue, and some time later new ones finally appeared. They're not the spring clips, they're plastic with a lever to loosen/tighten. Pretty nice, actually. One thing that really grates my cheese at the gym is when I have to go around collecting plates and clips for an exercise, and after I get started some bro comes over to the rack and just grabs whatever he wants off of it without so much as an "excuse me". I never leave a station mid-exercise.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a hardcore lifter person, more of a wimpy dumbell and machine person, and it's kinda hard to walk off with a big-ass leg press machine. Though I hate the people who get on something and sit there for three days and 47,000 sets.
ReplyDeleteAnd I gotta say I also hate the way the personal trainers gather up all the fun toys and monopolize them as I do not want to be hauling my own medicine balls, platforms, kettlebells etc to the freakin' gym just to play with them for a few minutes.
Cindy--wow, 5 floors? Must make leaving on leg day interesting :-)
ReplyDeleteTerra--people taking things while you're actually still using them is another level of rage-inducement.
Crabby--one thing my ghetto Y has A LOT of is step platforms, risers, medicine balls so even when the trainers are using 75% of them, there's still some left for the rest of us thankfully. Though it probably proves my theory. The reason my gym has lots of steps and risers and medicine balls is that, unlike collars or dip belts, they're too big to "accidentally" put in your gym bag "by mistake." Sigh.
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I hate to say it, but I think it might be partly a gender thing. I don't notice guys getting all up in each other's cages very often, but that may be because the guys taking things are a minority population at my gym. I'm actually kind of local to you - I live/work/work out in "Nerdvana on the Charles", if you catch my meaning - and most of the guys at the gym are obviously employees of the surrounding tech companies and the geeky corner of academic where I work. (They're a little afraid of me, I think.) Then we have a few meatheads. I don't know where they're coming from, but they're good for a larf when they aren't swiping things.
ReplyDeleteAh, I am frequently in Nerdvana. A couple good friends live near Central Square. :-)
ReplyDeleteDo you think they purposely take your stuff because you're a woman, or is it more like it doesn't compute to them that you're actually using it because *omg, what would a woman be doing in a power cage?*
I think a lot of it is "does not compute". The way they go about it, it's almost as though they don't notice I'm there, or they assume I'm not going to need anything bigger than a 5# plate. (I'm also 5'2", and a relatively youthful-looking 46 with some remaining vestiges of my earlier "cuteness", so I don't exactly look like a heavy lifter.) There's also some laziness involved. If a guy is in the cage next to me, and there's an unoccupied cage on the other side of the space, he'll grab plates off of my cage because it's closer. OTOH, once in a while I'll call them on it, just a reasonable "Dude, I was going to use that", and they act like I just got all hysterical on them. So who knows? I wonder how heavy I have to be lifting before the meatheads begin to fear me. If I could figure it out, those would be my goal weights.
ReplyDeleteBTW, peripherally related - I've been very naughty and spending lots of today going back through the blog, and I totally hear you on the "mom rage" thing. When I was working with dumbbells more, I could never resist putting them in their proper order on the rack, even though it was supremely annoying to be doing it.