My husband bought me a gym membership for my birthday. There’s a hint of irony wrapped into the gift, as there’s little need for me to workout anywhere other than where I already do – our family’s Martial Arts school with a high-aerobic kickboxing class and Bootcamp sessions using Russian kettlebells under the tutelage of the best – if not the best – and knowledgeable fitness trainers, my husband. What Scornavacco Martial Arts Academy offers far surpasses what any gym could offer – hands down.
The idea of a husband buying his wife a ticket to a year of workouts also exudes a bit of male snobbery or maybe its male control and protection too – although, knowing Brad and his dedication to health, that’s just me reading too much into it. I have flashbacks of my upbringing in Connecticut with trophy wives getting in and out of sleek sports cars and Volvo wagons on the way to or from their personal trainer at the gym. My mom, bless her heart, was never one of those ladies. Her trophy? She earned it at the church and in her real estate office, working her butt off to please the ladies so they’d buy a house from her and she’d have more money to put away for family trips and her daughters’ colleges.  One gym membership – and all these imagined apparitions? Yep.
It’s not an ordinary gym membership. We’re talking a sleek, sweet place. The walls are curved. A spa adjoins the women’s locker room. There’s a hot tub the size of our living room. Most of all, and this is what the martial arts school cannot provide, there’s a pool. Three of them. I slid into one of those pools – the 25 meter one with five lanes and water that was cool, not-frigid and not hotel-pool-warm. For the next half hour I was doing laps in the pool of my private estate. There was no one around until a couple guys plopped into a lane next to me, likely training for a triathlon judging by their suits that looked like bike shorts and the fact that they hopped out of the pool every four or so laps to do push-ups. The best feature of this pool was the windows. An entire wall of glass. The Colorado sun streaming through it, and I was in heaven.
So maybe it’s not a gym membership Brad bought me, neither was it a trip down memory lane. I have no idea if the other women in the club were as vapid as I imagined the trophy wives from my childhood to be, and the pool didn’t even come close to the 25 and 50 meter pools that I basically lived in as a kid. Those pools had an overdose of chlorine, multiple coaches barking orders, and cement walls. This was – and will continue to be – an entirely different place altogether. The next step will be to take the pool and move it alongside our Martial Arts school on Sunset Avenue.
Dr. Karla