Chapter 12

Turquoise Spandex, Anyone?

LIKE MOST NATIONS, the French take their sports very seriously. The French rugby team is one of the best in the world, the French soccer team has been a World Cup winner, and French tennis players regularly jockey for top-ten positions in world rankings. But if you take a mega–sporting event like the Olympics and peruse the statistics, it becomes clear that when it comes to winning the big medals, the French are disproportionately underrepresented. Sure they sweep the field in such obscure Olympic sports as fencing and judo, and they perform well in events like equestrian and shooting, but for any sport actually requiring a modicum of aerobic exertion (except perhaps cycling, thanks to a national obsession with the Tour de France), they are pretty much nonstarters.

You only have to look around you in Paris to discover why. Life there entails a lot of sitting around. Be it in cafés, restaurants, or bars, sitting, eating, smoking, drinking, and talking, are about the only activities your average Parisian will undertake on a daily basis. Occasionally they might multitask by combining rugby-or soccer-watching with their smoking and drinking, but a brief moment of tension in front of the TV during a World Cup penalty shootout is the closest most Parisians ever come to breaking into a sweat.

Make no mistake, Parisians love their sports, but not so much that they ever feel compelled to actually play them. You might see the odd jogger and the occasional Rollerblader on the streets of Paris, but generally speaking, the French are a relatively sedentary bunch.

Largely due to a complete lack of space for sporting activities (a city crammed with Louvres, d’Orsays, Jardins du Luxembourg, and Notre Dames has little space for soccer fields), and compounded by the fact that what little grass there is in Paris is patrolled and protected by a particularly heinous breed of Paris Park Police (or grass nazis, as I liked to call them), the outlets for sporting expression in Paris are few and far between.

As a direct result, Parisian kids are remarkably uncoordinated. Coming as I do from a nation where children learn to tackle before they learn to walk, I was shocked to discover upon arriving in Paris that France is raising entire generations of children with no hand-eye coordination. What little time Paris kids are allowed to dedicate to sports each day is usually played out on a patch of gravel, sandwiched between two apartment buildings. These pasty, sallow, sunken-chested little mites kick-and-miss their little hearts out on ten square yards of dust. Sure, they might be able to tell you the entire history of the Impressionist movement, but they can’t kick a ball to save their sheltered lives.

As a self-confessed member of that rare breed, the Australian male who is largely uninterested in sports (yes, I’ve been through counseling, but it doesn’t seem to work), I felt at first that in sports-averse Paris I had found my spiritual home. But it wasn’t long before I began to crave exercise. A year of drunken debauchery had taken its toll on my waistline, and something had to be done. Determined not to crawl toward middle age without once seeing proof that I possessed biceps, I decided to join the only chain of gyms that Paris boasted. Called Le Gymnase Club, the chain featured some ten locations around the greater Paris metropolitan area. Each one was as smelly as the other, and each had been painted by an interior decorator who obviously had a glut of unused orange. Together with poor ventilation and severe fluorescent lighting, it was about as convivial an atmosphere for exercise as the surface of Mars. A bunch of green-uniformed, mop-wielding cleaners would move in a desultory fashion from one room to the next on a never-ending circuit, and yet the place felt perpetually dirty. Every time I entered, I would ponder the viability of performing my exercises in a full-body prophylactic. God knows if my mother had seen the place, she would have whipped out her yellow gloves, pushed aside the cleaning androids, and given the place a good bleaching. But as it was, there was no gym alternative in the entire city of twelve million people. It was the stinky Gymnase Club or nothing.

Because the exercise fad had come relatively late to France, the nation was at least twenty years behind the rest of the world when it came to fitness fashion. A French man in shorts looks uncomfortable at the best of times. Put him in a pair of high-cut nylon running shorts—of the sort favored by long-distance runners—and finish the look with tucked-in tank top and a pair of black socks with white sneakers, and you’ve got your average French gym junkie, looking for all the world like a refugee from Olivia Newton-John’s Let’s Get Physical video. The more daring French gym junkies had a penchant for sweatbands and spandex Lycra—of every hue. I learned by observation that, generally speaking, turquoise spandex and men’s pasty white thighs do not a happy marriage make.

Like gyms the world over, the Gymnase Club had stumbled upon the happy realization that you can take a large sum of money from people at the start of any given year for services that, in the throes of a New Year’s resolve, they fully intend to use but never actually do. As I signed my check for membership, I did so smug in the knowledge that I would not become one of those statistics. I had been raised by a mother who made her children bring home the Glad Wrap from their sandwiches so she could wash it and reuse it. There was no way I was not going to get value out of the money I spent on my gym membership.

What this meant initially was that I experimented with the different classes the Gymnase Club had on offer, to see which best suited my needs. After discovering I didn’t have the coordination required for step class, and after spending the majority of the low-impact aerobics class in a heap of sweating, jellied flesh on the floor, I stumbled upon Body Pump. Body Pump was part aerobics, part weights, requiring participants to lift dumbbells and barbells to the beat of a medley of pop songs. Emboldened by this happy marriage of my stated aim (to get into shape) and my guilty pleasure (cheesy pop songs), I soon became a regular Body Pumper and found myself inadvertently part of a bizarre community of fellow pumpees.

Foremost among my pumping pals was Nathan, an expat from America who was similarly bamboozled by the strange French gym world into which he had stumbled. Together we would take up position at the back of the class and gleefully assume the role of sniggering troublemakers, performing our assigned tasks badly while concentrating on the serious business of making fun of our classmates.

There was Boney Maroney (not, I suspect, her real name), who was in her early twenties, had a shock of fuzzy brown hair, and was surely the skinniest human being alive. The sight of her spindly legs quivering as she lifted a barbell above her head defied all laws of physics. I used to worry that one day she would put one weight too many on her barbell and snap clean in half, only to be swept up by the cleaning robots, never to be seen or heard from again.

Then there was the Brick (full name: Brick Shithouse), so called because of his thickset muscular torso. The Brick would always take up position at the front of the class, just next to the instructor, with an unobstructed view of himself in the mirror. As far as we could tell, he spent almost as much time preening as he did actually performing the exercises.

Farther back in the class, but always in a position to have at least half of the class directly behind her, was the Freak. We were never entirely sure of her gender, blessed as she was with one of those harsh female faces that suggests a former life as a man. What we were sure of, however, was the color, texture, and mood of each of her buttocks, revealed as they constantly were in a series of barely there g-string leotards. The leotards were emblazoned with such sequin-encrusted slogans as “Sexy” and “Gorgeous.” Stretched over a pair of red fishnet stockings, and possessed of a tendency to disappear up her crack each time she bent over, the g-string leotards ensured that little about the Freak was left to the imagination.

But our favorite among all the gym regulars was definitely the Energizer Granny. She must have been seventy yet seemed to have more energy than most teenagers. She would bounce straight from a step class to the Body Pump room, never breaking a sweat and performing all of her exercises with an undue amount of enthusiasm and a crazed, almost delirious grin pasted to her face. I concluded that she was quite obviously on drugs.

While iron was pumped and cardio-funk was performed in the gym proper, all the real action appeared to go on in the locker rooms. I could have been wrong, but it seemed to me that there was a large number of people who had taken out gym membership for the sole purpose of indulging in a regular series of very long, very public showers. Now, I’m no prude when it comes to getting my gear off. I’ve performed the occasional midnight streak and skinny-dipped with the best of them. But there is gratuitous nudity, and then there is gratuitous nudity. And in my book it is not strictly necessary to weigh oneself on the communal scales, blow-dry one’s hair in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors, or rigorously apply moisturizing lotion to one’s inner thigh while in a state of undress. I couldn’t help but notice that some boys would be loitering naked in the locker rooms when I arrived for my gym session, only to be still loitering—apparently unable to find their clothes—over an hour later when I would leave.

For his part, Nathan had long since abandoned the practice of showering at the gym after a confronting experience with his sometime personal trainer, the ever-affable Loic. Quietly minding his own business in the communal shower one evening, he was horrified when Loic bounded in naked and struck up a conversation.

“So, let’s see how you are coming along then,” Loic said, motioning for him to turn around.

“Umm. Sorry?” asked a confused Nathan, glancing nervously over his shoulder.

“Come on! Don’t be shy! Turn around and show me those pecs of yours! Let’s see if all of this personal training is paying off!” replied Loic, apparently unfazed at the prospect of comparing muscle tone with a relative stranger, in the buff, surrounded by a troupe of similarly naked men taking suspiciously long showers. Whether he was simply a health professional who took his work way too seriously, or a seasoned shower stalker with more on his mind than burgeoning pecs, Nathan could not be sure. Either way, he never risked the Gymnase Club showers again.

For me, the gym became a semiregular weekly habit. Whether it was to clear out the cobwebs, to escape from the office, or simply to get an endorphin fix, I became a part-time gym junkie, visiting up to three times a week. Imagine then my delight at receiving in the mail one day what I can only describe as a “fat bastard letter” from the gym management. It came in the guise of a Satisfaction Questionnaire but was really just a postman-delivered cheap shot at my supposed lack of commitment to the fitness cause.

Dear Client, it began. We’re so glad you chose Gymnase Club to help you keep fit, but disappointed not to see you here more often. What a shame you don’t make better use of your membership. Perhaps you would like to fill out the following questionnaire to help us better understand why you never come to the gym.

Quite apart from the fact that it was untrue, it beggared belief that a service provider, to whom I had given a not inconsiderable amount of money at the start of the year to furnish me with gym facilities, was now taking potshots at my level of dedication to the fitness cause.

Are you lazy? the questionnaire went on to inquire. Do you have too many other work or family commitments? Or do you simply not like gyms?

Now, in some countries, a customer questionnaire might seek to discover if the service provider could in some way improve the service it was offering clients. Before accusing customers of slackness, apathy, and abject laziness, a gym might, for example, inquire whether its equipment is sufficiently state-of-the-art or whether the hours are convenient or the facilities generally clean. But this was France, I had to remind myself, a country where the customer is never very important, much less right.

I considered my options. It was too huge a slight for me to let slide. I had to confront it. But how best to do it? I started scribbling an outraged note in the “additional comments” section of the questionnaire, explaining that I did indeed use their facilities often, despite the fact they were out of date and constantly filthy. I thought of pointing out that were it not for the fact that they had a gym monopoly in Paris, they would have gone out of business long ago. I even contemplated telling them that orange walls and fluorescent-lit gym interiors went out of fashion with leg-warmers.

But then the futility of it all overwhelmed me. I knew the questionnaire would only be opened by some wholly uninterested work-experience kid who would throw it directly in the trash. So instead I went onto the Internet and printed out the respective medal tallies for Australia and France from the Sydney Olympics and scribbled across the top: Australia: population 20 million, fourth place. France, population 60 million, sixth place. Where do you get off telling me I’m lazy?

I slipped it inside the postage-paid return envelope and dropped it into the mailbox outside my front door. It was petty and would doubtless be ignored, but it made me feel so much better.