Park Rats Versus Gym Rats.
Running just the other day in the most delightful February weather than I can ever recall, I proudly established myself as a park rat. To my very limited span of knowing, this is the first such reference, and therefore rather dubious.
So allow me to un-dubiousify my self-proclaimed moniker.
Upon entering a gym you smell the sweat and toil of people before you. Approaching the scales you see slides set on notches that aren’t yours. Exiting the locker room, you see personal bests for each particular month recorded on a whiteboard. Climbing onto the treadmill, you can still see the total calories and miles clocked onto the machine from the previous user. Advancing toward the bench press, you see a number of weights on the bar which is not the same as what you would use. It was someone else’s – someone who was very proud to lift that bar 6-12 times. And that’s just it, being a gym rat pits you in an arena with so many other gym rats, all with something to prove. Why, if you had nothing to prove, then why the gym? Why the progress? All around you there is grunting, huffing and puffing, and sometimes even whimpering. One-uppers abound.
Stepping out of your vehicle at the park, the sun is waiting. Children are playing and climbing all over everything. People walk their dogs along the perimeter of the park. There is a sense of leisure here, and a complete abandonment of the need to validate oneself. And then as you start running, following the nature exercise trail into the woods, you notice that this isn’t a treadmill. Your only gauge is how you feel and what remains ahead. And even what you feel makes no difference when you glance skyward and reconsider the hugeness of the atmosphere, the complete vastness of this planet. What you do or do not do at the park is not recorded. What led you to the park in the first place could not have been a dutiful act to punish yourself in hopes of ripping muscle fibers, but rather to simply enjoy what is.
Something about the gym rat affiliation never seemed alluring to me. Maybe it’s the monthly fee, or maybe it’s the complete objectivity and task-oriented nature of the monolithic industrial workout machines in the gym. Nothing felt so synthetic to me as the summer I spent going to the gym, working out, using the tanning bed, and pounding down a protein smoothie. Not going to the gym is another way of stating that I’m not going to be any more muscle-bound than I am now, but then that is also another way of stating that I’m content with who I am right now. And to continue spinning my wheels, I can go so far as to say that the gym is a place people go to resculpt themselves into someone they like better.
Meanwhile, the park exists without expectation. And yet magnetism still exists, and people still go. Children hide and seek, oblivious to what it means to be judged. Young, radical adults are hurling frisbees at one another and performing stunts as they catch and throw. And I’m trotting through the trail, expecting nothing, and not feeling as if anything is expected of me. Perhaps this may seem dull to the reader, but the jolt of recognition I feel when I survey the expanse of landscape around me is not dull: it is electrifying. And it is life, unmitigated.
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