I went to the gym 44 times this year. How do I know this? Because a few months ago, I discovered that my gym knows more about me than I do. They know each and every time I’ve walked through their doors. They know what I don’t want to know: I don’t frequent them nearly as often as it feels like I do.
My gym, New York Sports Club, belongs under the umbrella of The Sports Club Network, with locations in the East Coast metropolitan cities of Boston, Philadelphia and Washington D.C., making the company—according to them—“the largest health club company in the Northeastern United States.” Their locations are numerous and nondescript; the company’s financial success seems to have been predicated on what I’ve come to refer to as “the Duane Reade effect,” after reading a New York magazine article about how that drugstore chain’s growth was built partially on its willingness to fit into spaces that are advantageous location-wise, if less impressive design-wise. To walk into a New York Sports Club is to know that you should probably ask where the locker room is, but everything else can be found by mere generic instinct. The rowing machines will be in a weird corner (and will likely move at some point during your use of any given club) and there are two of them. There will probably not be enough stretching space. The green liquid in the bathroom is soap, the purple is shampoo, the peach conditioner.
Being a New York Sports Club member means you’re paying not a ton of money (especially with a corporate discount) and that the experience you’ll be getting is just fine. Going to a New York Sports Club is not like going to an Equinox, with its free tampons and Barbasol shaving cream in the bathroom. Equinox is the girl you never quite think you’re good enough for, until you break up after you realize she never split the bill even when you went to restaurants that she invited you to. New York Sports Club is the relationship you fall into out of something like laziness, until you break up five years later because you have an epiphany regarding the fact that you’re more invested in Gilmore Girls than the living, breathing human sitting next to you.
Perpetually being the “just good enough girl” meant that this year was a rough one for New York Sports Club, or rather, for their parent company Town Sports International; they revealed they were looking for a buyer, and later lost their CEO. Subsequently, stock prices have plummeted. Looking to cut costs, the company reportedly (as I learned on Twitter through a fellow member of both the media and the gym) started making members request towels because they were losing millions of dollars a year in stolen goods.
This information is comforting to me, because as you will soon understand, my year at NYSC was far less impressive than it felt at the time. 44 gym trips comes out to less than one trip a week. I can feel my muscles atrophying just thinking about it.
Things started off looking promising. The opening of the Greenpoint location in the summer of 2014 greatly upped my weekend gym attendance. As you can see, January appears to have the Greenpoint location to thank for almost all of my working up a sweat during that month. Shout-out to that one Friday evening drop-in though; as I recall, I got a facial and then was feeling so good about my aesthetic self I decided to keep riding that train to hot bod town.