The Gym, freebies, and fasting

I went to the gym yesterday. I first went for a run in the morning along the local roads: a 5km route which saw me traipse past the gates to houses belonging to the Sultan of Brunei, and the Von Opel family. I drove the ten minutes to the David Lloyd, plonked in a nape of green space between Park House School and Newbury Rugby Club. I went upstairs and went through the doors to a wide, air-conditioned gym floor. It’s well-equipped with weights, various machines, treadmills, you name it. There is also a multi-purpose area which looks like a climbing frame, as well as spinning and yoga studios. There were once squash courts. They’ve now been replaced by a flashy new room for ‘Blaze’ - a workout class consisting of dumbbell exercises intervalled with treadmill sprints and hitting punch bags. It’s very trendy at the moment. You can’t be relevant in the ecosystem unless you do it.

I feel infinitely grateful to be able to come to this gym whenever I come home. As I said in a previous post, all my needs are met, there is a level of steady comfort, and luxury in this gym. I especially appreciate it seeing as out in the real world, away from the family nest, I have to settle for less. The gym I’ve joined in Saint-Malo is pathetically named ‘Basic-Fit’, one of the biggest chains in France. True to its name, it’s pretty budget. There is no air conditioning, it is smaller, no proper changing rooms, if you don’t bring a towel they threaten to chuck you out. What I found most painfully amusing is that there are no water fountains. The only bottle-filling station has this strange ionic liquid, reserved for those who want to pay an extra ten euros per month. Us commoners have to make do with the taps in the toilet. It’s also over 30 euros a month and they’ve woven a crafty scam where you’re committed to a year’s membership when you naively register.  I put up with it - it’s the best option really in this town. It’s close to my work and lodging and has decent equipment (some machines are sub-par however). I chuckle to myself because I know that if this gym chain were to exist in the UK, it would be completely outclassed in all aspects by chains such as ‘The Gym Group’, and ‘PureGym’.

I continue going to BasicFit because it teaches me the benefit of saving money and searching for freebies. In fact, now that I’m working for the man and being paid little cash, I’ve been forced to find and push the limits of what I can get away with. When I was at Cambridge last year, I had two gyming options: The beautiful, faraway David Lloyd or Downing College’s gym which was ultra practical after a day at school. It was great that Downing had a gym but it was fairly basic, crap, some would say. What was even crapper was that the college made you pay 20 quid a term to use it. As a keen supporter of basic human rights, I opposed this. I devised a set of plans to use the gym without having to submit to its paywall. The first was to go to the porter’s lodge (the holders of the keys to everything). I feigned innocence and said that I had actually done my induction and paid my dues but that my access card was no longer working. He looked at me suspiciously, and boomed a ‘you wouldn’t lie to me now would you?’. I felt like I was acting on behalf of the greater good and so I sacrificed the truth on this one occasion. He judged that I’d passed the test and added a gym-access to my Cambridge card. This only worked for a few days before the access was removed by some IT desk-jockey who realised the spreadsheets didn’t add up. After this, I would get in by waiting outside in the morning, knocking on the door with the hope that some polite fresher would let me in. It almost always worked…

All this to say that I am beginning to discover the pleasure in spending less, in trying to get as much as I can with the least amount of money. “Make your BURNER less than your INCOME” - as finance podcast bro Scott Galloway likes to say. I try and do this but I often fail or am too kind to myself. A lot of the time, I have hardly any money and I’ll treat myself far too often to restaurant dinners or nice take-away food. But it is always good to try and save as much as possible, free apple and orange at work, occasionally risk the train without a ticket. This is probably the limit to how far I’ll go. I have friends who have snuck into hotels and freely eaten buffet breakfasts. Others used to “forget” to pay for clothes at Urban Outfitters. They’d justify their actions by shrugging and saying that “when The Man wins, everyone loses.”

A reliable way of saving more money is to eat less. This is part of the reason I started intermittent fasting, to cut out breakfast and thus to reduce my weekly food spend. My motivations in continuing to fast every day are spiritual - the tastier food, savings, and leaner body are all secondary. As I wander about before lunch, fizzing with a strange inner force, I think of the protagonist in Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha, how whenever he faces a new problem he repeats to himself “I can think. I can fast. I can wait.” I hope to develop such a mindset.