Bally's Blunders

My gym, I think is the craziest gym in the nation, just to be honest. It has almost become a ritual where my roommates cannot wait until I get home to hear the stories. Something weird happens almost every time I go. I am an early morning gym gal and the crew that is with me is pretty steady the same group of about 15 people who are crazy enough to be there when the doors open. Since we are a small crew we know when someone new joins our ranks, and rarely do they last over a week but it is fun to see new faces every now and then. I have a gentleman who has almost the same exact work out schedule as I do, and we usually end up on machines next to each other every day. Since we only exchange smiles and few words (I mean who really talks at 5 am) we don’t know each other’s names. But when telling stories to my roommates if anything ever involves him we call him Bill. Bill and I exchange many side-glances or smiles though at all the random stuff that happens at our gym and one morning we had a long enough conversation to decide our gym is one of the most random ones out there. Here are two of our favorite stories…

One morning Bill and I were running on the same end of a long line of treadmills, (we both like to watch ESPN and Fox News while running) and we kept hearing a loud thud. By the third time I took my ears phones out and only to be shocked at the cause of the noise. On the complete opposite side of the treadmills a young man had turned the speed up too fast that he could not keep up with it. He fell on the belt that thus it shot him off onto the ground. I was so shocked I quit running and was about to see if he was okay when he got up, turned the treadmill up even faster and jumped back on just to have it shoot him off once again. We watched him do this 3 more times and had heard the thud at least three time before that. So he had a total of six falls before the staff told him he needed to stop. After surveying the scene and seeing no video cameras or his friends there, Bill and I were only left with the question why would someone do this, and why do it at 5 am in the morning! Still a mystery.

Our other favorite was one morning a gentleman began showing up at the gym in his street clothes and walking around. He would look at the equipment but never get on anything. Every now and again he would stretch but then walk around the equipment again, and just stare at us who were actually using the equipment, and he was continually checking his watch as if annoyed to be there. One morning Bill and I were upstairs with the weight machines when he came upstairs and had the most disgusted look on his face as he approached some of the machines. He actually sat on one next to me did one leg lift and then quickly got up again scowling at the machine in disgust. I laughed because at that moment I saw he was wearing a wedding ring. I quickly put two and two together grabbed Bill and told him our creepy friend was probably not so creepy in fact but we guessed his wife sent him to workout and he was just killing time before he had to go home and claim his morning victory. I will give him this credit in that he now actually does workout but it took at least a month of him showing up and doing nothing to actually get to that point.