By William Walls
Whether it’s sad to say or not, the most welcoming place I know, the most supportive place I go, is this gym, Anytime Fitness in Ukiah. I imagine any of the gyms around town are like that, supportive, accepting of where one is right now, always with an eye to getting better bit by bit.
Gyms are what churches wish to be: places to heal.
There are lots of us here at the gym, who need healing.
Susan is there right where you expect her to be, on one of the running machines, droning away, looking straight ahead, determined. She looks like someone who soldiers would follow. I would follow her. She is about my age. I’m 73.
She said to me the other day, “you’re getting stronger, I can see it,” and I tear up in that way the throat and the eyes work together, bypassing the heart, clenching fast and hard like a fist so you missed it that something was going to make you choke up. Not that you have much control anymore over what makes you choke up, anyway.
I hit a rough patch, health-wise, a few years ago, and climbing out of it takes it’s toll. Despite the medical miracles I was there for, was awake for, watched be performed upon my very self, the rough patch doesn’t just let go. Send you on your merry way.
I think Susan is lying to me. Maybe. I think she is. But maybe not. Like I said, everyone is supportive at the gym. It’s like all of us know one thing and one thing only, one thing that doesn’t go away. One thing that no matter how you feel, is still true: that the only bad work-out is the one you don’t do.
I don’t see Danny over there on the bench press. That could be his whole name, “Danny on the bench press.” His real name, the one he would own and earn like a name given by a native American tribe. He is 71 years old and could hang with the young guys when they come in after work, push the weight they do, leave those three circle plates on both ends of the dark steel bar, that’s fine. That’s good right there.
Danny has cut trees in the woods all his life, learning from his father and uncles and doing the same, cutting trees like it was all he ever wanted to do. That is all he ever wanted to do. It looked like a life. Working. One can picture him at peace in the woods with the memories of those good men watching him, walking with him.
One time there was a braggart in a bar saying he was the best there was in the woods. Just halfway-serious, after-work talk. Third beer talk. But Danny was a kid and he knew that he knew men who really were the best there was in the woods. And he wanted to say something. Wanted his father to say something.
Just then Danny’s dad bent his head down and said, “I don’t ever want to hear you spouting off like this fellow. Cause no matter how good you get, there is always somebody out there better.”
Danny was in the woods a few years ago and sort of put a tree he’d felled earlier out of his mind, a bad slip of the old brain. The tree was there leaning against another like that tower in Pisa, hung up pretty good but not deserving to be put out of mind.
Anyway, it wasn’t hung up so good after all, and when it fell it had it’s sights set on Danny, just about pounding him straight into the spring soft earth. Danny woke with his mouth and his nose five inches into that earth. His chain saw was beside him but it had shut off. So that was good.
He blew his safety whistle and a young fellow working not far away came and that was all Danny knew until he was in the helicopter. You name the body part, Danny broke it, but three months later he was back at the gym, working out, and a month after that he was back at work. In pain, yes, but some of us need more assurance we’re alive, and pain delivers that message.
At the age of 67, Ted has completely revamped his work-outs, his goals. He drives in from above Willits four days a week to make his appearance at the gym. At one time, Ted could press 400 pounds, bench press and squats, both. But he pulls, now, he says. He doesn’t push.
What does that mean?
It means lighter weight, more repetitions, the machines set to do just that, be pulled and not pushed, the pulleys set up high to be pulled down, from three angles now instead of one. Plus the doing of it. Six days a week, he says. Four days a gym workout and maybe two of walking. Maybe take a Sunday off. Maybe not.
But do it! 45 minutes. That’s all you need, he says. 100 reps. Start out with 50. It takes 45 minutes. Do you have 45 minutes?
Ted says he timed himself for a complete start-to-finish, ready-to-go-out make-over, and he had spent that long in the bathroom, 45 minutes. “So if I spend 45 minutes getting cleaned up to go to the movies, I’m pretty sure I have 45 minutes to put into the only body I’m ever going to have.”
Ted fell 20’ off a building once and landed on his head, with his head partly on a sidewalk, knocking off a section of skull the way they say the earth was hit long ago by something the size of Mars, knocking off the moon.
Minor pieces of Ted like neck vertebrae were snapped and damaged, too.
He got better. He did what he needed to. He credits his being in shape, his “good overall health,” with getting him through that.
I tell Ted I had a stem-cell transplant a few years ago, after being diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma.
“Hey,” he says, “that’s what my wife has. Yeah, blood cancer. Hey, you’ll be all right.”
I tell him, “I know. I agree. Medical science. When it works, you can’t beat it.”.
“Yeah,” he says again. “You’ll be all right. My wife has had it for 8 years. She’s doing great.”
“I think I am, too,” I say.
Before I left, Ted came over and said “one more thing. Daily fasting. Going without eating half the day. Try that. 7 or 8 pm into the next day. The next morning. The body gets it’s best rest when it doesn’t have to digest food.”
I don’t tell Ted that last bit sounds to me like the hardest of all. What? No, Costco pumpkin pie about 9 pm?
But we can try. I can try. That’s what we do here on this bit of Earth that didn’t become the moon. We try. In this life. And at the gym.
-William Walls is a Ukiah resident.
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