Part of my exercise warm-up is my brief run from my flat to the gym. A short distance from the front door of the club I begin walking cautiously to avoid being run over by a Mercedes or Jaguar whizzing down the drive.
We are currently in the season of the resolutionists so, even during my discount off-peak membership hours, I have to weave my way between the shiny cars parked outside (and fight for a place on a rowing machine once I’m inside). Every time I do this I think to myself that if their owners didn’t spend so much money driving everywhere they might not have to spend even more money trying to remove the lard that accumulated while they were behind the wheel, but if that line were followed by too many others it would bring an end to Britain’s epic Clarke-Brown boom and cause the global collapse of the capitalist system as we know it.
Anyway, today as I arrive at the entrance I hold the door open for a woman coming out of the building with transparent plastic bags on her otherwise unshod feet. I assume that it is some wacky new aerobics fad, but she feels she has to explain the truth to me: “I’m not mad,” she begins—not, in my experience, a good start to any explanation of unusual behaviour—“some nasty person stole my trainers.”
I mean, WTF? Unless you buy a whole year’s non-evening, non-weekend subscription up front for cash, this is not a cheap place to shed non-financial pounds. Every single vehicle outside that building cost more than I’ll earn this year and, from what I’ve overheard of their gossip, even the staff are raking it in from their private work. And who wants to put their feet in someone else’s whiffy sports shoes? In case you haven’t been following, people, I ain’t living in no ghetto. What a weird world.
I don’t get it – how did she get her trainers stolen in the gym? Did someone knock her out on the running machine and remove the items in question from her feet when she was unconscious? Or was she silly enough not to put them in her locker whilst she was showering?
Sorry. Bad day today. Not my usual sympathetic self :0(
Some people rather like shoes that smell of other people’s wiffy feet apparently. I would have thought this sort of thing would be quite normal in Brighton.
You can usually get a day pass to most gyms without too much effort. It can represent easy pickings to slope around a dressing room and see what you can pick up. In my own gym, this was an activity undertaken by a series of Eastern European women on day passes who did indeed steal things like trainers, expensive cosmetics and the like. Some people also left their combination locker locks on the combination number so that all the day pass visitors had to do was help themselves. And I quite often see trainers left out and not put away in lockers. There are also often very expensive full length coats hung up on open rails because they’re too big to go into the lockers.
Being a club somehow convinces people that they’re safe, especially because they assume that everyone there has paid both the join up fee and the regular membership fees. This is not the case….
..Just be sure not to grunt:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2006/11/02/national/a155917S06.DTL&type=printable
I get all of my best trainers from by ‘free trial visit’ to the Virgin Megagym near my work. Posh people don’t carry cash so they never have the £1 coin needed to use the lockers either, and they’re surprisingly trusting in member-only clubs.
I’m surprised more people don’t try it.
Sorry – I missed Judy’s similar confession until just after I hit ‘submit’.
Great minds think alike Ms Adloyada.