Ode to “Moron Guy”…

Posted on April 20th, 2006 by Christine.
Categories: True Story.

Okay… so I’m not really one to make fun of people (at least not as brutally as Christopher does), but I just had to write a post about the guy I saw at the gym today.

It started before I even got there… I was walking from the parking lot to the building when I hear a male voice behind me singing/whispering/grunting out the lyrics to a heavy metal song. I might be the only one who finds it annoying when people sing out loud to their ipods, particularly because no one else can hear the music and they way they’re singing usually does very little to help you distinguish what song they’re listening to. But apparently not everyone minds… especially the people who are guilty of singing in public to their ipods. And this guy didn’t. He continues to sing the lyrics he knows (shutting up for a few seconds for lyrics he doesn’t know) all the way to the building.

I walk in. Hand the attendant my key card to be scanned. It’s kind of common sense that you do this every time you walk in so they have a record of who came and they can make sure you’re a member. Now… let me describe this… it’s a huge– and I mean “huge”– desk in the middle of the walkway. You can’t miss it. There are people sitting there in uniforms. Can’t miss them either. American Idol wannabe guy walks right past them toward the locker room.

“Excuse me…” the attendant says. Does heavy-metal lover hear them and stop? No… of course not. He can’t hear the attendant because he can only hear what’s playing on his ipod. So he just keeps going.

I get on my crosstrainer. Keep in mind, I do the crosstrainer for an hour… which gives me plenty of time to look around and observe what’s going on with everyone else. And today I got my money’s worth… a full 60 minutes of entertainment.

I look over and see heavy-metal guy… who I will now refer to as moron guy… you’ll see what I mean in a second. He’s a small guy… about 5′7″ maybe 160 lbs max and skinny. He gets on the lat pull and pins his stack about half way down… which is WAY too much weight for him. Then he makes really loud grunting noises with an ungodly pained expression on his face as he does about four reps. From the way his mouth contorted, you’d think someone was ripping his balls off with every rep. After that… he lets go of the weights and lets the stack SLAM down. But hey… what else can he possibly do with that much testosterone and adrenaline coursing though his veins, right?

Then… he literally hops– or maybe I should say “springs”– off the machine, plays air guitar for a second and looks around to see how many women are admiring him. None were. A few, including myself were suppressing giggles, but that’s about it. Did he notice? Of course not. No one could possibly ever be thinking anything but how cool he is.

Here’s the best part. He’s ready to move to a new piece of Nautilus equipment, but decides he needs to play air drums on the seat of the lat pull first. So he does… then he stands up and does a “cymbal crash” on the lat pull bar (which for those who don’t frequent a gym… is a metal, rotating bar that attaches to a cable on a pulley so that you can pull the weight stack down). Anyway… the bar (which like I said, rotates 360 degrees) swings around after he smacks it and comes about an inch from hitting him right in the face. Moron guy ducks the swinging bar barely avoiding getting hit in the forehead, takes a second to recover, and then moves on.

Did I mention he kept putting on his sunglasses as he was lifting. The sunglasses went on, then on top of the head, then on the floor next to the machine, then back on his face. I guess no one told him that there is no sun inside the gym. But kudos to him for wanting to protect his eyes from UVA rays.

The next hour was spent by him continuing to over lift, play air instruments (including pretending to sing to an audience that would have been sitting on the sit up bench had an audience actually been there), and jumping off piece after piece of equipment, rolling his shoulders back and smacking himself in the chest as he grunts out a “Yeah.”

The lyrics to an “Offspring” song popped into my head and I dedicated them to him. The one about if you don’t rate, just overcompensate… hehe… that’s the one.

A few times, I glanced over at some of the other guys who were lifting free weights. You know… the guys with great bodies, who spend real time at the gym doing actual sets that include more than fourreps, and don’t feel the need to draw attention to themselves…? They weren’t singing to their ipods or playing invisible instruments or looking around to see how many people were admiring them. They were… oh… I don’t know… lifting weights, talking out between sets, adjusting their MP3 players every now and then.

I could barely control the laughter by the time I left. Moron Guy was still there “doing his thing.” God bless him. It takes all kinds. And lucky for me… at my gym… the entertainment is free.

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