How the other half sweats

My trusty (and cheap!) gym at Columbia University is closed this week. It's not a catastrophe really; I only hit up the gym for my weekly yoga class and two weights sessions each week. While I have a plan for dealing with the yoga -- take a short break and then start taking lessons at my instructor's house -- I was forced to come up with a different solution for the weight lifting sessions.

Fortunately, I had a couple one-week trial memberships to two of the fancier gyms in the city. I managed to lose the one for Equinox but I had safely stashed the one for the Reebok Sports Center in my wallet months ago. (It came out of my NYCC century ride registration packet.) I dug it out, called the number on the card and set up an appointment for yesterday after work.

I anticipated a full dog and poney show and a pretty aggressive appeal to join, but it was fairly low key. They just gave me a pass, a map of all six floors (!!) and a schedule for the 150+ weekly classes. Oh, and they did give me an additional paper with membership prices on it. The monthly membership (just under $200) is a little more than I pay for a full school year of access to Columbia's gym. I actually thought it would be worse, but it turns out the real kicker is the "initiation fee". I can't help but think of the cost of joining some exclusive frat or sorority in college when I think of this gym. We're talking $1200 -- for the priviledge of joining!!

There's no denying the gym is beautiful and insanely spatious, however. I'm always intimidated by the trappings of wealth, but I was so ridiculously uncomfortable in this place. I took the elevator to the sixth floor and started working my way down till I found the equipment I needed. It ended up being a room the size of all the three tiny rooms at Columbia in one (and mind you this was repeated on several floors).

There were probably no more than 6 people in the room when I walked in and all of them were men. Worse yet, I swear they were all staring at me. Since this is getting long, I'll relate my experience with the staring folks later. For now, let me just say this gym is ludicrous and I'm not going to let these rich folk intimidate me out of making good use of my free week there.

And on the theme of saying good things about my workouts, I busted that training goal of leg pressing 130 lbs. My glutes are crazy sore today, but the satisfaction of having lifted 160 lbs lives on!