They tell you about the gains – but never about the bants. When it comes to gyms, fitness magazines will drone on about reps and sets – but they never talk about the chat you get there. Yet I’ve seen a man at one moment hacking at weights like Jack Nicholson at a hotel door, then launching into a disquisition on Lowry. I’ve heard people break off their bench presses for a barney about Donald Trump.
To hear the best banter, steer clear of cardio machines: those narrow treadmills and stationary cycles are for the breathless, the friendless and the joyless. Spin classes are worse: social interaction there is limited to sticking territorial towels on bikes, as if those torturers’ saddles were sun-loungers at risk of German occupation. What you want is a zone where people are in the mood for a meander: the changing room or the relative quiet of the free-weights area.
The financier Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a rule that runs like this: get your news only from cocktail parties and gym changing rooms. Professional interest dictates that I declare this law nonsense. Still, there is a dizzying contrast between the world as painted by the media and political classes, and as it is seen from the council-run gym I’ve been attending for the past year.
A couple of months before the EU referendum, as pundits and pollsters declared that Remain had it in the bag, I asked my trainer which way he was going to vote. Leave, he said. Others piped up: leave, leave, leave. They included the EU in a list of grievances that included: shit jobs, crap pay, nowhere affordable to stay and a political class that didn’t give a toss. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t all Brussels’s fault or that Leave was telling porkies: they’d had enough.
As the commentators were airily assuring us that “real people” didn’t care about the Panama Papers, guys at my gym told me how incensed they were that David Cameron’s dad had squirrelled away millions in tax havens. When Trump defended his “locker room talk”, I thought of my changing room where the grey-haired swimmers had just the other week been discussing Jeremy Corbyn (largely favourably).
I’m not claiming my gym is some latter-day agora, only with added dumbbells. Most of the time it’s just men with earphones, grunting through their routines. But it can be more than that. You go to the gym to be nudged out of your comfort zone, but it can also get you out of your echo chamber. Whatever the media may imply, politics isn’t some magical thing that happens in parliament and TV studios. It takes place on buses, in chicken shops – and over by the Smith machine where some young men are moaning about gentrification and wondering where the hell they’ll live.
