Making Friends at the Gym

The gym is not a friend emporium.  Or at least it isn't to me.  But then I've never wanted it to be, ever since I joined my local fitness haven aged nineteen.  I actually only joined because the friend I was living with at the time had just joined.  At the time I had a passing interest in fitness (I did Rosemary Conley DVDs at home once or twice a week, though this had to stop when a male neighbour confessed to spying on me through the window...which is another story entirely) and I decided I didn't want her becoming fitter than me!  That amusingly endearing, childish competitive spirit that absolutely ISN'T at all present in me now (cough).

But anyway.  When I signed up to join the gym, I was given a questionnaire on which I was asked my main reason for joining.  Top of the list of options was "a better social life".  Not "fitness" but "a better social life".  I'd already been on a tour of the gym with all its poseurish/sweaty/loud (delete as applicable) inhabitants, and I wondered who in their right mind would go there solely to make friends.

Nearly fifteen years down the line (God it's been AGES!) and I've made a total of two very good friends from my gym membership.  That's about one every seven-and-a-half years.  I've done well, haven't I?  But the thing is, I still don't really 'get' the gym being a place to make friends.  Not unless you're not very serious about actually working out, anyway.  I go the gym to keep fit, but also to zone out; it's my haven against all kinds of nasties in the outside world, like work and stress and lack of sleep.  When I'm there I also tend to look like the scrag end of a joint of lamb, except better dressed.  Just.  That isn't conducive to a deep and meaningful conversation about life, is it?  Once, fairly recently, one of the gym receptionists saw me in the High Street.  "Oh, you look really nice!" she gushed, sounding surprised.  Well...I suppose anybody would look "really nice" if the only other times you ever saw them, they were dressed in ill-advised Lycra and had a face the colour of a salad tomato.

Besides, the things people tend to talk about in the gym seem to revolve around food.  It really does.  Especially when you go to the classes.  Groups of girls will congregate and chatter about the latest fat-loss shakes and how little they'd had to eat that day.  When the class is finished, the changing room is awash with people telling each-other they're "only going to have a salad or a plate of vegetables" for dinner.  Or they talk about spray-tans and the best way to de-fuzz your bikini line.  I never feel less traditionally feminine than when I'm in the gym changing room!  My reluctance to join in with these conversations probably explains my ghost-like presence in the gym generally; because I've been going for so long people know me in there, so they'll nod a hello, but they'll rarely stop to chat.  I keep wondering whether I should mind about that, and make more of an effort.  Get a spray tan and only eat vegetables after a Zumba class.  But I couldn't; it's just not me.