Free The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones by Sandra Tsing Loh Page B

carrying a flask of his own uric acid in a satchel. I can’t tell you why, but he seemed pleased about it. Americans are surfing at fifty, dating at sixty-five, playing rock guitar at eighty. How terrifying! Game on!
    The next layer of Equinox fascination was a copy of the weekly exercise-class schedule—a document I started taking to my As We Change evening-bath rack to peruse like an intriguing novella. My goodness! Just the language brought to mind a hyperfantastical version of Logan’s Run , with the difference being that rather than getting killed for the sin of turning thirty, we were all going to get crunched or burned or punked or something. All the instructors had names like Skip and Moon and Keli. The exercise-program names were reminiscent of the CIA or Navy SEALs. I ask you: What is METCON3? TARKL? VIPR?
    I think these frightening activities have something to do with intervals, weights, Dynabelts, and the Israeli military, if possibly not in that order. And who were the people, I wondered, who would regularly (ever?) turn up for all these outlandish classes? I mean, sixty minutes of spinning, every weekday morning, at 5:45 A.M. ? Good God! I could cycle for an hour, check my stocks, take my cholesterol meds, tweeze my nose hair, and it would still not even be 7:00. My days are already interminably long. To get up before dawn to do something miserable like spinning and then to have even more day left over afterward? Which they wanted to fill with—something? One could only marvel at these people.
    More immediately, though, due to confusion about our Equinox “package,” Mr. Y and I have somehow ended up buying twelve weeks’ worth of individual personal training. (Was it twelve weeks apiece or twelve weeks for two people for a total of six each? I found it difficult to grasp our Equinox finances, as if it was all in a foreign currency.) In any case we decided to embrace the experience, and dutifully appeared on a Wednesday around lunchtime for our first training.
    Mr. Y’s trainer was an affable Venezuelan named Fabrizio. Mine was a steel-cut Scandinavian named Stef, a twenty-three-year-old with a tiny nose.
    The first thing I learned is that today’s personal trainers are all into “the core,” working “the core.” There is also quite a bit of this disturbing thing called “planking.” Overall, I have to say that buying personal training seemed a bit like buying an Adelphia cable bundle. You just wanted HBO but it turns out you also have to take Cinemax and Starz. I’d like smaller thighs, but equally urgent to Stef was that we strengthen my woefully weak lats, a part of my body I couldn’t even see. So there you go. After twelve weeks of body sculpting I might still have a big if more muscular rear end, but I would also have these amazingly strong invisible underparts of my shoulder blades.
    On the upside, instead of sort of vaguely Black Swanning it all day so one can heap all of one’s measly fifteen hundred calories into a reasonable dinner, I would now be obliged to eat not just breakfast and lunch every day but carbs. Stef was firm about that. In order to get enough fuel to power through my rigorous new weight-training regimen, I would have to eat carbs. Carbs were back in!
    I in fact start needing those carbs because Stef is pushing me so hard—with giddy “games” and “relays” of her own invention, all of which (like so many adult activities) fall just short of “fun”—that I actually start to dread our training sessions. But because of the tireless endurance Equinox trainers have, Stef is merciless about texting constant reminders about our weekly schedule so I can never quite “forget.”
    Indeed, at one point I actually started thinking, Oh great. To cope with midlife depression, I’ve signed myself up for a weekly exercise program so demanding that the very idea of it makes me even more depressed. It seemed unfair. I had courageously made the financial commitment (which,