After the magazine collapsed in 1990, a victim of the battered economy following the 1987 stock market crash, I spent much of my leisure time with Jonathan, often hanging out and sleeping over at the sprawling loft on Great Jones that he shared with a brilliant, hilarious writer and actor, a woman named Mo Gaffney. We were all living some version of a creative, freelance life, though mine was significantly less successful than theirs, and we had the luxury of whooping it up pretty much any—sometimes every—night of the week. At a party there in those days I’d even met Rob, the trainer, a charismatic guy with a presence much larger than his modest stature and Mediterranean good looks: dark, wavy hair, warm brown eyes, generous lips, strong jaw.
The whole neighborhood, but that block of Great Jones especially, felt like a horizontal fossil record of my social evolution, each building and stretch of pavement and bar, café, or restaurant an ever-shifting reminder of the personas and aspirations I’d tried on like so many pairs of Doc Martens back when I felt like I had an eternity to figure myself out. I was still throttled by all the disappointments in my professional and personal lives, but my pace picked up as I got closer to Rob’s gym, in a building next door to Jonathan’s old loft. I was excited to make progress on my curious new endeavor.
I pushed open the heavy industrial gray door, stepped into the lobby, passed the receptionist for an art gallery and rehearsal studios connected to the experimental La MaMa Theatre, and climbed the creaky, listing wood stairs to the second floor, where I was due for my first workout. I’d joined gyms and had trainers before, but I’d never been able to stick with any kind of fitness routine for long, despite how much I loved working up a good sweat. I’d go a few times, or for a few months, and feel great about it, but then I always let something else—like late nights out or looming work deadlines—get in the way.
I reached the top of the dimly lit stairs and opened the door to find something that felt more like an airy dance studio than I’d expected. Light poured in from two ten-foot windows at the back wall, offering a view of trees, fire escapes, and buildings. The floor was covered in white-speckled black matting, and there were just a few machines, along with racks of free weights, balls, ropes, and brightly colored resistance bands against a perimeter of mirrored walls. There was a bank of lockers near a coat rack and a kitchenette with shelves of towels in the front, but there wasn’t much in the way of the intimidating weight machines that you’d find in a regular gym.
I waved hello to Rob, who was finishing up with another client. “Hi, Diane!” he called out. “Why don’t you get changed and then I’ll be right with you.” I headed into one of the changing rooms and pulled off my street clothes and shoes and put on my sneakers and standard running outfit: track shorts, sports bra, man’s sleeveless ribbed undershirt. When I came out, Rob ushered me into the kitchen to choose a midcentury-modern-style plastic tumbler from a multicolored stack, filled it with water, and directed me over to a corner at the back where there was a treadmill, a stationary bike, and a rowing machine.
He was as handsome as ever, though his easy smile cut deeper crinkles at the corners of his eyes. He was stunningly well built, with the definition in his chest visible beneath his T-shirt. He had developed an interest in sports and fitness early, watching his mother exercise along with Jack LaLanne on TV, and had earned a number of varsity letters. He went on to become a competitive body builder, a two-time Ironman, and a ten-time marathon finisher. After graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree in exercise science, he worked as a trainer in gyms and corporate fitness programs before cofounding Great Jones Fitness. Over the years he’d gained experience in handling all sorts of clients, including lifelong jocks, type-A executives, high-strung creative sorts, and—a growing subspecialty—aging adults who’d never worked out but were suddenly afraid of falling in the street and cracking a hip.
“How’s the knee feeling?” he asked.
“Pretty good—a little crunchy now and then, but it doesn’t hurt if I don’t stress it too much.”
“Okay, good. Let’s start with three minutes on the bike and see how that goes,” he said, eyeing my legs and adjusting the seat height to near my waist. “Try that.”
I hoisted myself clumsily onto the narrow leather triangle, fumbled with the pedals until I got the toes of my sneakers under the straps, and started pumping. I loathed stationary biking—I found it dull, and my hamstrings and quads were so weak they usually cramped up before I could get my heart rate going—but I supposed I could handle anything for three minutes.
“You don’t have a lot of weight machines here,” I said, panting lightly and feeling the warmth of exertion starting to pulse up my calves.
“No, we like functional exercises—sometimes with resistance or weights, but you use the muscles in the way you’d actually use them. We just think it’s healthier in the long run than working, or overworking, them in isolation the way those machines can.”
He asked if and how often I exercised and whether I’d played any sports. I told him that I’d been trying to swim a few times a week at a gym near my office, since I couldn’t yet run.
“But I’m not an athlete at all,” I said. “I always took dance instead of playing sports growing up.”
“Well,” he said with a chuckle and shake of his head, “that’s athletic.”
I suppose it is. I wondered why I’d never thought of it that way as I finished up on the bike and followed him to the middle of the floor. Athlete. It just wasn’t a label I’d ever considered applying to myself. That was a badge reserved for people like my sister and some of my friends, who brought home ribbons and trophies and patches establishing their progress and victories and achievements, not for awkward, timid, hypersensitive kids like me who spent a lot of time in their heads and could memorize and understand and perform line after line of Shakespeare but never hit a home run, who could tease out the underlying themes in novels and classic mythology but never won a single race.
Rob handed me a four-pound medicine ball and guided me through a warm-up with it, ten reps of various motions to activate the major muscle groups with squats, twists, chops, and swings, ending with something he called “around the world,” which involved drawing enormous circles in the air with the ball from above my head down to my feet. If the bike didn’t get my heart rate up, this surely did: I was gasping and sweating, my whole body so slick the ball was threatening to slip from my fingers.
“This is just the warm-up?” I said as we both laughed. “Feels like the workout.”
“Don’t worry—we’ll take it slow,” he said, putting the ball back on a stand. “Let’s try some hip circles.”
He showed me what to do, resting his hands against a bar set on a tall metal rack and then lifting one leg out to the side and rotating it around to the back before reversing to return to the side. “Twenty on each side.”
It was like the back half of a ballet rond de jambe—circle of the leg—in the air, a motion I’d grown up practicing, so it seemed simple enough and at first felt like a nice airy stretch. But the standing leg soon gave me trouble, with the (obviously weak) hip muscles that were working to stabilize everything screaming at me to stop.