There’s a grunter in my Spin class. There’s also a loud iPod singer on the track, a yeller on the weight floor, a toilet-seat sprayer in the bathroom, a gaseous runner on the treadmill, a beanie baby collector in my yoga class (who actually sets her collection up around her mat) and the girl who sings along with all the songs in my Hip Hop Class (oh wait, that last one would be me). And up until now, I never realized that something could be done about all the “quirky” folk.
Christopher Carter came up with an inventive solution to people who annoy you at the gym: knock them off their bikes. He would have stolen the guy’s lunch money too except he was wearing bike shorts and – hello – pockets! In his defense the “victim” was reputedly a total prick, screaming “you go, girl!” and grunting loudly every five seconds. According to witnesses, Carter was only acting out what everyone else in the room was imagining.
Gym Rage
We’ve talked about gym rage before – if you don’t know if you suffer from it, take my handy quiz to find out – and anyone who spends much time in a gym has felt that familiar burn. I consider myself a pretty laid back person in this category and so none of the people listed above have truly bothered me (made me giggle, definitely). But there is one group of people who are guaranteed to make my blood boil to the point where I might actually consider giving them a swirly in the locker room: the mean girls. They are the ones who make fun of other gym-goers, point and laugh loudly, butt in line and are still emotionally arrested at 8th grade despite being old enough to abuse tanning salons and hair bleach. And there is nothing I’d like more than to grab their visible thong strap and yank. Hard.
So yeah, I know what Carter was feeling. And so did a New York jury, apparently, because they acquitted him of assault even though he confessed to “storm[ing] over to Mr. Sugarman’s bike and lifting it, crashing the back of it into a wall” before dropping it back to the ground.
I gotta admit, I can totally see this scene played out in my mind. And I giggled. There is a certain amount of satisfaction involved.
But I still can’t get on board with what he did. It was rude. Moreover, it set a bad precedent of how to deal with annoying people. Sure we’d all like to grab the Yogurt Girls by their waving spoons and shake the aspartame out of them. But we don’t. It’s called civility.
So what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done (or seen done) in retribution for a gym “sin.” Spit in Gatorade? Weights dropped on feet? Picture taken with camera phone and then blasted all over Facebook? Granny panties dropped in gym bag? Come one, ‘fess up!
There was a grunter in my old spin glass but she was tough stuff so rather than piss me off it just made me want to compete against her. We were such gym nerds that after each class we’d whip off our Polar F11s and compare stats. She’d always win though, damnit! Although usually not by much.
Um, I’m not a gym goer, but I definitely have shared lab space with one of the most annoying people ever. I tried to break the radio so she couldn’t hook her iPod up to it and subject us all to her poor taste in music.
It didn’t work.
I’ve never experienced much gym rage before. But if I’m exercising in a group of people and someone gets in the way (like when we’re running and someone cuts me off, or someone stands right in front of me at bellydancing so I couldn’t see the mirror), that starts to irritate:)
No gym membership here, but it does boggle my mind when people drive out-of-their-lane-of-traffic in an effort to “almost” hit me. I am a good pedestrian, always running against traffic and getting out of the road for on-coming vehicles. It’s those traveling in the same direction as I am that I have the trouble.
I am not immune to throwing up a fist and shouting “What the hell is your problem?!” It’s broad daylight people, there’s just no excuse.
There’s also the one lady in the minivan who drives past me and she goes about 1 mph and gawks at me the whole time. WTH? I’ll be ten feet from the road in someone’s yard and she acts like I’m going to suddenly dart in front of her. Good thing my neighborhood is relatively quiet…but don’t get me started on the dogs that chase me down! LOL! Me? Irritated? NOOOOOO!
Wow, I’m pretty fortunate–most gym folks I’ve run in to have just been at worst, mildly clueless. No one nearly as evil as the Mean Girls.
I do hate when someone hogs one weight machine for ages, doing a bazillion sets and draping themselves over the machine while they take long rest breaks in between. Sometimes if I’ve done everything else and wandered by about 14 times and they’re still there I’ll ask to work in. Then I’ll do my one little dinky set and make them rearrange all their settings again.
I have all of those people at my gym too, but its so funny to watch & keeps me entertained, so no gym rage stories 🙁 But I have lots of air rage stories from when I was a flight attendant…LOTS!
My bodybuilding friend always said that if you had enough energy to yell with every rep, then you should be doing more weight.
He was pretty big, so I took his word for it. There was a guy at the gym where I used to work who would sing. No one really got mad, but no one talked to him either. I guess that’s retribution of a sort … plus he was a really bad singer.
The only time I ever got mad at the gym was when some sweaty dude or dudette would use a machine and not wipe it down after. It always made me want to loudly call them back, “Excuse me. EXCUSE ME, I think you left your sweat on here. Mind coming back to get it?”
I’m not their mother and I’m sure not going to sit in their puddle and get some nasty disease. GROSS!
One thing that pisses me off is when people come into the Group Ex room and talk all the way through the class. One time after class I went up to one of them and told her how distracting it was, for both the members and the instructor (I wasn’t teaching at the time). She was a little put off, saying something about how they hadn’t seen each other in a while. I just stood my ground and repeated that it had been very distracting. Hopefully she got the point. I find it incredibly rude when people do that. If you can talk all the way through a class (especially a cardio class), you’re not focused enough.
Another time, I was in the middle of teaching a spinning class. Now, the spin room at this gym doubles as the stretching room. So this one girl walks in, in the middle of class, on her cell phone and proceeds to start stretching in an empty space, chit chatting away. I tried talking over the mic with cues and such, hoping she’d find it too hard to hear in her phone, but she didn’t get it. I ended up turning up the music a little louder and she left. I suppose that’s the passive aggressive route (I could’ve gone over and asked her to leave), but I thought it might be less intrusive on the class to do it that way.
I used to take an early Pilates class on Sunday mornings. There was a very popular kickboxing class right afterwards, and the people in the class would plaster themselves against the windows and stare at us. They’d also talk REALLY loudly while they waited. And one time, a guy kept opening and closing the door and fiddling with the doorknob. When our instructor asked him to please stop, he said he was trying to “fix” it.
Our class ended 5 minutes before theirs began. But as soon as they saw we were done, they’d storm into the class and claim a spot, even if we hadn’t gotten up off the floor yet.
It was nuts!
I’ve run into people like these when I used to go to the gym regularly. I prefer to exercise alone, or at least within a 6-foot diameter personal bubble, especially when near the body-oder, hacking/coughing, weird-noises-emitting folks! 🙂
Luckily I’ve never see the gym rage. And luckily it’s never been me on either side of it. But I will share 2 things that have caused me to try to inhale/exhale/feel these endorphins I’m supposed to be getting by exercising.
The massage therapist at the gym has to use this tiny room off of the women’s gym. Once I got a massage there, and people were blasting the little TVs, despite signs saying turn down the volume when the sign is out saying “massage in session.” Also someone yapping on the cell phone in there despite zillions of little signs saying no cell phones.
Second pet peeve- place stealers! Once, in a kick boxing class, someone kept stealing my “place” whenever I went & drank some water!!! Are you kidding me? Really? Argh! &&@!!!###!!!
I almost struck a prick at the gym before. I walked right into his personal space and waited for him to make his move, but instead he lowered his head and walked around me. It was a classic “he-was-rude-and-I-didn’t-let-it-go” situation.