The weird girl at the gym

If you go a gym ever, you know it’s a good place to people watch. And gyms tend to magnify all the slightly strange things we all do. And every gym—mark my words!—has it’s own cast of strange characters.

Well, I’m one of those characters. I admit it.

I mean, I could tell the story of the time I fell off the fancy escalator-like stairclimber machine at the Maryland Farms YMCA in Brentwood, one of Nashville’s nicest areas. And how I laughed uproariously at myself because it was hilarious. . . and how all the Brentwood Barbies stared at me in disdain.

I could tell the story of the time I was at the Downtown Y and very focused on getting my run finished in a short amount of time because I had to be somewhere. I stuck my stuff in a cubby and some guy stopped me and was all chatty and wanted to know if he could stick his keys in with my stuff and not just leave them in some random cubby. I said OK and hurried on to the cardio theater, leaving him standing there looking puzzled. I didn’t realize until hours later that he was trying to talk to me and/or flirt. Sigh.

Or I could tell you about yesterday. Because of the fact that I weighed yesterday morning, I headed to the gym after work yesterday afternoon. I decided to go to the cardio theater and run a couple of miles on the treadmill while watching a movie because it was VERY hot and humid outside yesterday at 3 p.m. So I changed clothes, grabbed a towel, and headed to the cardio theater.

First, I dropped my towel not once but THREE times after getting to an open treadmill, finally just leaving it between my treadmill and the one next to me after it fell there the final time. (I did pick it up later.) Then, I realized that the movie that was being shown was “The Blindside.” OK, I haven’t seen “The Blindside.” Gasp, all you want, Christendom! Here’s the deal: sometimes, the more people tell me I absolutely HAVE to see something, sometimes my response is simply to think it can’t be as good as everyone says and resist. So I’ve resisted.

But yesterday in the darkened, crowded cardio theater, I couldn’t escape that movie. So I started watching. And I found myself laughing out loud at a few points. I furtively looked around to see if anyone was trying to find the laugher in the darkened room. No one seemed to be, so I felt like I wasn’t too weird.

Until I did it again. And again.

And then, totally sucked in, I found myself CRYING while running on the treadmill when the family takes Michael Oher into their home and makes him a part of their family. CRYING! Crying when he said he’d never had a bed of his own. Crying when everything within me screamed, “That’s Jesus! That’s what we’re supposed to do!” Crying because it was sad, and it was good, and it was right.

But crying in public on the treadmill just the same.

So I’m pretty sure that I’m known in some circles at the Y as The Girl who has Emotional Breakdowns in the Cardio Theater. Or that Weird Girl who Laughs Too Much. Or just Weird Girl.

I think I’m OK with that.