I have been a semi-serious independent athlete since my CEGEP "Fitness Through Weight Training" class. For those of you counting, that's twelve years of running, cycling, cross training, spinning, pilates, dancing (all kinds), yoga (hot and cold), capoeira, half marathon training, gym memberships, and at-home programs (like Insanity and P90X). I exercise for the same reasons most (sane) people exercise (despite some claims that I am not all there upstairs): because it's fun, because it can be social, because it releases endorphins, lets off steam, staves off illness (and, often, boredom), boosts my energy, and keeps me strong.
I am currently training for a marathon (happening in March), and as all marathletes know, running every day is neither enough nor the proper preparation for a 42km race. Getting a gym membership, even if only for the use of the pool, was a no-brainer.
I've been to Italian gyms before. More precisely, I've trained (once) at one, and visited another. Neither one was a good fit for me; the first was small and crowded, the second enormous and elite. The one I settled for best represents both my fitness interests and my social class. Still, as observable in all three, this is the general demographic of an Italian gym (minus the trainers, thank goodness):
Firstly, 75% men (except in the pool, where the women dominate)
of which:
25% in their late 20s to late 30s "using" the weight room and REALLY using the spa area
25% in their early 40s to mid 50s REALLY using the weight room and pool
25% women
of which:
30% in their late 20s to mid 30s who have mistaken the gym for the club
20% in their late 30s to early 40s who stop moving just before they start sweating
and the rest, in both categories (50% of women, 50% of men), are the golden oldies, who *actually* bring it. 120%. Every time.
There's something wrong with this picture, wouldn't you say? Not least is the fact that I more easily identify with the 65+ crowd than with my own contemporaries.
I see my female cohorts arrive at the gym fully made-up, bejeweled, and in their best (often newest, tightest, and most revealing) gym attire. Their Nikes (or, recently, New Balance, since it has become *trendy* here, but we'll get to that later) have never seen an outdoor road or a drop of sweat. They spend more time admiring themselves in the locker room mirrors before class (or arranging and rearranging their carefully messied hairdos) than changing into and out of their clothes. You won't find a single one of them in the weight room or on a treadmill. You'd even be hard-pressed to find one in the swimming pool. You will find them, however, doing yoga, pilates, or following any other low-impact, sweatless class imported from America (where it was big five years ago) whose only aim is to help them maintain the perfect bodies they inherited genetically or acquired through natural selection (and suicide diets). It's a crime to weigh more than 60kg here (per woman of average height). You'd better increase your daily downward dogs if you do.
Few of my male cohorts share these classrooms with them. They, instead, lurk outside them in the weight room, occupying machines often for fifteen minutes at a time, of which only three are spent lifting (or pushing, or pulling, or stretching), and the rest are spent in idle conversation with their neighbour, who is working at an identical pace. They needn't do anything more: like the women in their age group, they also arrive at the gym with perfectly sculpted physiques acquired, seemingly, through the exclusive consumption of a can of tuna daily, or from the time they spend in the hydromassage basin, Turkish bath, and sauna (since 60% of their gym time is spent there).
I won't fault the mothers - women in their early 40s who are likely at the gym in an attempt to escape their overwhelming daily routines for the little free time they have in a day. It's enough that they manage to commit to a fitness program, no matter its level of intensity. For everyone else, fitness is a spectator sport, it seems. (Although with no one working, one wonders what gym-goers look at at all aside from themselves in the mirror.)
I have had this conversation with my boyfriend many times. (He only recently renewed his gym membership after a long hiatus caused by the same frustrations I experience when I go there.) He maintains that Italians - especially young Italians - go to the gym to be seen and "pick up." But every young Italian man knows that Italian women neither pick up, nor let themselves get picked up. Ever. Winning them over requires months of arduous courtship: gifts, kind gestures, grand dinners, and a demonstrated ability to consistently Say the Right Thing. What's more, in cities overrun by foreign students, like Florence, young Italian men have learned quickly that the fastest and easiest way to "pick up" (or be picked up) is to aim for an enterprising and more or less independent American or Australian at any of the city's typical student-visa watering holes (the Sant'Ambrogio or Santa Croce areas, for example). In fact, the only men I see attempting to "pick up" (much younger) women at the gym are those in their middle age who have taken the experience gathered in their forty-five years of life for granted and get cocky about it.
So what gives? Why has the sauna become synonymous with fitness in Italy, while the real work remains undone?
For all intents and purposes, gyms in Italy are status symbols. For young people, frequenting one means making it in the world of fitness and beauty. You don't go to the gym to get fit or beautiful. You go to the gym because you already are fit and beautiful -- by society's standards, at least. And the more fit and beautiful you are, the bigger, brighter, and more beautiful your gym will be. I saw men enter and exit the Virgin Fitness Center in San Donato - one of the city's biggest, cleanest, and most luxurious gyms - in perfectly tailored three-piece suits and ties. It isn't a stretch to say that to Italians, the gym you attend says as much about you as the car you drive.
And fitness in general (as is the case with everything in Italy) is inherently linked to fashion and fashionability. When I lived here three summers ago and went running for the first time, even when taking an unpopulated route outside the city center, people looked at me like I was out of my mind. They could see no value in my exerting myself in that manner in the heat of the summer months without concrete incentive or the backing of a mob mentality. Three years later, running has become a "fashionable" activity here. People do it to fit it and make of it a (half-hearted) life philosophy. There are aperitivi for runners (which differ from regular aperitivi only in that the people attending swap their high heels or leather boots for their pristine "formal" New Balance shoes); running gear has gone mainstream even among only would-be runners; identifying as a runner - a deliberately solitary sport for many - now means being lumped together with a group of intended teammates. It seems Italians found the silence of the implicit solidarity among runners deafening, so they made it scream. Running here is not a sport. It's a scene.
It's the exclusion of other scenes, too: rarely will you find a "sporty" person who likes to dress up when they go out. Being sporty - without really being athletic - is its own religion.
It's a different world altogether for me, for obvious reasons. In Baltimore, I frequented the university gym or other facilities near campus which, catering as they do to a university population, boast a diverse crowd of focused athletes at all levels, from varsity teams-in-training to graduate students dealing with dissertation frustration, to elderly faculty members just trying to stay active. In Montreal, even the professional gym I expected to feel completely out of place in created a welcome atmosphere for those of us who, unlike its regular attendants, were neither bouncers or stunt doubles nor professional dancers. In both places, the gym was a place I went to to be me. Unapologetically. Unabashedly. Without concern for what others thought of me or what I looked like. I went to the gym to do me. Everything else was just a detail. My attitude toward the gym has not changed here. The only thing that has is that of those around me. In Baltimore and Montreal, gym-time was "me" time for everyone. Here, it's popcorn time.
Two summers ago, I followed a yoga class in Florence. It was meditative yoga, and the class was made up of middle-aged people. We spent more time talking about the positions than holding them; more time socializing at the end of class than participating in it. Our mouths were very fit, indeed.
