Working Out – A Lifelong Journey
Friday, January 19th, 2024: Places, Special Places.
1976-1977: Rebounding in the Gym
I was an undersize child – the smallest or second-smallest boy in my class – and weaker than the other boys and many of the girls. They called me Tiny Tim and taunted, chased, bullied and beat me. In junior high our physical education teacher was an ex-Marine drill sergeant who marched us around the neighborhood in tight formation and encouraged the strong kids to pick on the weak ones like me.
I grew about six inches in high school, and found the companionship of other unpopular outsiders. But when I fell in love at the end of my senior year, my girlfriend’s father, a respected math professor and former basketball star, forbade her to see me, calling me a “spineless jellyfish” who wasn’t fit to date his daughter since I hadn’t excelled in sports.
So we hid our relationship from him all through college, until she dumped me six years later for her much older boss. My best friend in grad school encouraged me to start working out, so I headed over to Stanford’s tiny, antiquated weight room, where one of the first people I saw was my ex’s new fiance. Still, I managed to put on over 15 pounds of muscle mass before finishing my master’s and rejecting the career I’d prepared for.
My most vivid memory from that gym is of the tall, slender man from India, a rock climber, who did fingertip pullups on the door frame. I, on the other hand, was building muscle to compensate for the loss of self-esteem in being suddenly abandoned by someone my life had revolved around for six years. But it’s never that simple. I was challenging and learning about my body in many other ways then, after growing up repressed and inhibited – building muscle was just one of those learning opportunities.
1988-1993: Growing Into the Role
Bohemians don’t work out. I was no longer weak, but I was comfortable enough in my body after grad school that I went for more than a decade without trying to make it any stronger. It was the drummer in my band, my close friend Mike, who finally said I didn’t have enough presence to be a bandleader, and should hit the gym to bulk up.
He became my fitness coach, getting me started at his gym, Gold’s on Oakland’s Grand Avenue, near beautiful Lake Merritt. Gold’s was a bodybuilder’s gym, and from the beginning I enjoyed their intensity and sometimes flamboyant personalities. Ordinary fitness buffs are often afraid they won’t be welcome at bodybuilder gyms, but it’s just the opposite. Everyone who puts in the effort is respected.
The impetus for this effort was my friend’s belief that bigger muscles would inspire my bandmates and appeal to our audience, but again, it’s never that simple. Building muscle feels good, and in moderation, looks good – and looks are important to visual artists. I quickly came to love my new body, and wanted to see how much better I could make it.
Mike taught me to warm up, to stretch, and to spend hours per session. He inspired me to eat healthier – he blended and guzzled fresh carrot-beet juice daily and got me started eating brown rice. He was also taking a choline supplement, a stimulant a lot of athletes were using at the time, and had settled into a routine of 3-4 hour workouts twice a week, plus running on the beach at Alameda.
Gyms can feel like home in some ways. I walked into the Oakland Gold’s one day just as news helicopters were following the police chase of O. J. Simpson on the 405 freeway in Los Angeles, and all our eyes were riveted to the public drama on the big TV screens above the exercise bikes along the south wall. I discovered right away that there are always people who seem to live in the gym – bodybuilders included. They work hard on their reps, but between sets they socialize as if they have all the time in the world. I occasionally talk to strangers, but mostly I’m the quiet, intense guy who just wants to do the work.
I took the choline, but I had no interest in cardio. I just wanted to see how big I could make my muscles, and I started wearing skimpy tank tops and tight shorts from boutiques in San Francisco’s Castro District. When we played the I-Beam, a famous club in the city, the bartender sneered and called me a fag.
This was when I met the love of my life, an aspiring musician and aerobics instructor. I attended one of her classes, and the students congratulated her on how buff her boyfriend was.
1993-1997: Working Out Homeless
But at the same time, my obsession with the desert was consuming me. I ended up leaving the girl in Oakland and moving to my desert land, where I did pullups on the beams of the old miner’s shelter I was living in, deep in the wilderness, with one long workout per week at the new Gold’s Gym in Victorville during my 80-mile trips to town for supplies.
Then I ran out of money, the long-distance girlfriend dumped me, and I became homeless and increasingly in debt for most of the next four years. Shortly before breaking up, she’d remarked on how flat her new man’s chest was compared to mine, and I realized that a muscular lover is not that important to most women. But I never stopped working out, and I got used to random sessions in whatever gym I happened to be near at the time.
I moved to Los Angeles in 1995 and joined Gold’s Hollywood, the home gym for Fabio, Hulk Hogan, and my favorite TV personality, Huell Howser. Jodie Foster was sweating on a stationary bike when I entered one day.
Gold’s Hollywood was probably where I reached my peak muscle mass, more than 20 pounds over my base weight. I’ve always enjoyed the hardest exercises the most, and at that time I was saving wide grip pullups for last because they were so damn hard. I’ll never forget how good I felt when I touched the floor at the end of the last set.
1997-2001: Climbing the Dotcom Boom
I returned to the Bay Area at the start of the Dotcom Boom, inventing a new career and paying off my debt. I was living in Pacifica, but Gold’s had opened a fancy new gym South of Market near where I was working in San Francisco, so I joined that for a while. Then I started my own business, working from home at first, and joined the Pacifica Athletic Center, in a former supermarket near the beach. This was another bodybuilding gym – they had a power-lifting contest, the perennial winner of which was Bill Armstrong. I loved living in Pacifica and that really felt like my first “home” gym.
Fitness addicts know that as long as you’re working out, you’re in pain somewhere. Until late 1999 I’d just had muscle strains. But suddenly my back felt like I was being sliced in half at the waist – my lumbar disks were starting to collapse. From then on, my focus would no longer be on building my body, but rather on avoiding injury while remaining able to do the things that make my life worth living.
After opening an office in North Beach, I ended up with a new hippie girlfriend, who shunned gyms and fitness as yuppie affectations. Since I refused to stop working out, she suggested we join a climbing gym together, and since she lived and worked in Berkeley, we joined the Berkeley Ironworks, in an old factory near the Bay. And since climbing gyms also typically have weights and machines, I could also keep pumping iron.
My close friend Carson had started working out and mountain biking with me years earlier, and now he started climbing too. We sometimes climbed together at his gym, Mission Cliffs in the city. I’d mostly worked out alone since the early days with Mike, but a partner was always welcome, especially since you could get a beer and burrito together afterwards.
I’d tried to maintain my gym schedule while traveling before, but during the Dotcom Boom, when I had lengthy engagements in Chicago and Portland, I began to take advantage of hotel fitness centers.
2002-2005: Working Out Busted
As the Boom collapsed, my last relationship fizzled out. I moved to the desert and stayed in an old ranch house where I invented strength-training exercises using rocks and parts of the building. I was still into indoor climbing and found a gym in Vegas where I could boulder on occasional shopping trips.
I visited a close friend in Los Angeles who took me to the Hollywood YMCA, where I started doing a new exercise I’d seen someone else doing, the halo. I was doing it with 45 pound plates then – now I can only do 25! On another visit, I climbed at a gym in Culver City where the desk clerk broke into my locker, stole my credit card, and used it to buy gas and groceries before I could get it canceled.
The tech industry work eventually started coming back to me, and I got a series of contracts in the Seattle area. First, I lived on Capitol Hill and worked out at the old Downtown YMCA, a maze-like, multi-story brick building. Then I stayed at an extended-stay place in Bellevue – a really interesting time when I harvested wild blackberries for breakfast among the tents of the homeless in an urban pocket forest, and went on runs in the foggy dawn through the affluent suburb to a distant park that combined a farm and wetland. There, my gym was a generic urban fitness center I can barely remember.
And whenever I returned home, I bouldered alone or climbed with Carson at the Bay Area climbing gyms.
2006-2015: Moving and Losing
I’d been trying to escape the city for years, and when I could tell the work was going to keep coming, and clients would pay me to travel, I made one more scouting trip, and found my place in New Mexico. There was a fitness center only a few blocks away, and it would become the longest gym membership I’ve ever had – but unfortunately I have no pictures to share. Suffice to say it’s very low-key, and the regulars were people I interacted with regularly in the community – one of many advantages to this small town.
But shortly after moving I began my longest-lasting contract, in San Diego, and started commuting regularly by air, at first via Tucson, a three-hour drive. At first I would drive to Tucson, fly to San Diego, work a day, fly back, and drive home during the night, to save money. After the money accumulated and the travel got old, I began staying over at Tucson and working out at my favorite hotel there, which has a bigger-than-usual fitness center.
Eventually, I was established enough that I could arrange longer stays and connecting flights from our local airport. I found a favorite hotel in San Diego – they had a minimal fitness center but I only needed it for one session at intervals of two weeks to two months, between which I worked out at home.
That contract sent me all over the continent, from the south to the east to Canada and the northwest, and on every trip I found a gym or fitness center. The one I remember best was a neighborhood gym on the near west side of Grand Rapids, apparently closed now.
And at least once a year I flew back to Indianapolis to visit family, where I’d join my mom at the YMCA. Originally we worked out at the Athenaeum, the ornate old “German House” where my mom was a donor and I had special privileges. But then they opened the ultra-modern CityWay facility south of downtown, and we just had to go there, despite the hardship of getting me in as a guest. I could make both work – CityWay was new and shiny, but had the downside of a more bourgeois clientele.
The San Diego work was completed, and I had a short hiatus, running out of money again before resuming in Palo Alto in 2012. There, the client wanted me onsite, and AirBnB was a new thing, so I found myself living first in Pacifica, where I rejoined the Pacifica Athletic Center almost a decade later, in its new digs in a strip mall. Later I settled near Stanford, working out on my alumni pass at the new Arrillaga Athletic Center. I always worked out early before hitting the office, and I was the old guy surrounded by students, so my workouts were always efficient, helped by the clean, well-maintained equipment.
2015-Present: Fighting Back
My right hip had lost all its cartilage by 2007, and by 2014 I was unable to hike, so I had it resurfaced in 2015, and that began a long ordeal of serial joint conditions and arduous rehab, during which I still tried to work out as much as possible. I’d terminated my tech industry career so I was working out and getting rehab at the same facility – my home gym. And then COVID hit, and my house caught fire.
I bought a really cheap weight bench and adjustable dumbbells at Walmart at the start of COVID, and after the fire I cleaned those and set them up in my temporary place at the edge of town. I bought resistance bands I could attach to door hinges for back and shoulder work. Six months later I was kicked out of that place, and I set up the bench and weights at the side of the weird front room in the inconveniently subdivided old house I moved into next.
Finally my house was repaired enough for me to camp there, and I moved my meager fitness gear into the small dining room, which had been my music studio before the fire. For a year and a half I’d had to stash the fitness gear in a corner, moving it out to use and back when I was done. Now I could leave it set up in its own dedicated area.
I missed going to the gym, but it just didn’t feel safe yet, and I’d found that when working out at home, I could multi-task. So I began accumulating the gear I’d been missing the most. Floor mats so I could handle the dumbbells without damaging the refinished wood floors. A cable pulldown machine because the door-mounted resistance bands had turned out to be useless. Dipping bars, fixed-weight dumbbells, and a storage rack. And finally, a near-gym-quality adjustable bench. It seems to be all I’ll ever need, and it was accumulated gradually, after research to find mid-price options of sufficient quality, so the cost impact was low.
My workout has continually evolved, while sometimes returning full circle to old favorites. During recovery from injuries or joint conditions, workouts become rehab sessions, and after I recover, some rehab exercises become part of my weekly routine. With a lower back condition, I prioritize the core, starting with a core warmup before a lengthy stretching series, then into upper body strengthening. Some of my long-time favorites are wide grip pullups/pulldowns, dips, dumbbell pullovers, and the halo. Besides my lower back, the biggest recurring problem is rotator cuff tears in both shoulders. Since I live alone, the lengthy incapacitation of surgery wasn’t an option, and physical therapy made the problem worse, but on my own, I’ve cobbled together exercises that mostly enable the surrounding muscles to compensate for both injuries.
During 36 continuous years of working out, I’ve trained at between 50 and 100 different gyms and fitness centers all over North America. But on my last trip to Indianapolis, I used a gym for the first time since COVID, a huge new bouldering gym in a former factory. Since my foot condition prevents climbing, I only used the weight room, but it felt like coming home.
For the traveler, every gym is a space station, like Denny’s used to be on my routine drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles during the punk years. The same familiar, useful stuff – timeless, unchanging, comforting, a refuge along the way where you can do what you need to do to stay strong. You’re an outsider – anonymous, a secret agent – but there’s always people-watching and the opportunity to interact with strangers, and those interactions are eased by the universal language of gyms. Man buns seem to be the thing now in Indiana – Hoosiers are always at least a decade behind the coasts. And I was surprised to see patrons going barefoot throughout – traditional gyms consider that both dangerous and unsanitary.
I’d eventually come to see this legacy, this continent-wide continuum of gyms, as one of my natural habitats. Temples of the body – to invert the euphemism – magical forests of complex structures, like childhood erector sets, standing ready to maintain and repair the precious bodies gifted us by evolution and genetics. Communal spaces where we can be inspired and validated by a stimulating variety of brothers and sisters devoted to the same noble aim.
Stay Strong Max – my only mistake was trying to master golf – I made it to be good enough to teach but it destroyed my body along with 2 botched surgeries = don’t play golf