Like many other people, my New Year resolution was to get fitter. After a few injuries, and with the pounds beginning to creep on as my fortieth birthday recedes ever further, it felt like a good time to get more active. Reading Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running has also been an inspiration. His descriptions of how running and writing balance each other in his life, and his honest acceptance of the gradual slowing down that comes with age, is better than any motivational sloganeering you can get from more mainstream books about staying active. So I joined the local gym here in Winchester, and so far it’s going nicely. I have been a member of the same gym before, on and off since 1993, although I haven’t been for a few years now.

A local authority gym in a pretty ordinary leisure centre might not seem a promising subject for a historian, but I think too much when I’m on the treadmill and there is a lot of material there.

First off, there is a personal history. I can trace some large parts of the past 15 years of my life through remembering about my gym membership – or its lapses – and what I was doing there. I can link it to training for certain events, like a half marathon I ran in 1995, and I can link it to rehabilitation after a couple of operations. I also remember going a lot during the final stages of writing my first book. I can link my lapses to the times when our children were born, and leisure time – however worthily spent – just dried up. The networks of people I have known at the gym have changed in line with changes in my life. When I worked at the local university, I used to see some of my students there, but now that I’ve moved to a university in another town and they have graduated and moved on, I don’t have that link. Now I know lots of people through our children’s school networks. Then there’s the way that I’ve slowed down as I’ve got older – back to Murakami again. Things that seemed easy years ago now take far more effort. The trade off, though, is that my sense of achievement has increased, especially as now, just one month into my current membership, I can already feel the benefits of exercise. I’m not trying to get all Nick Hornby about it: a council-run gym can hardly inspire the same emotional responses as other sporting allegiances. However, I can easily relate important phase of my life to membership and its lapses, and to what I did when I was here.

Just as its place in an autobiography might be overlooked, so the gym’s place in local history is easy to see as marginal. The building itself is early 1990s post-modern lite, a pretty characterless functional space with a few pastel touches. In a city like Winchester, where anything built since the English Revolution is seen as modern, it’s not the kind of building to excite historians. The most notable thing about it is that it replaced an older swimming pool that burnt down. Inside, the gym is placeless – I could be in any gym anywhere. However, coming back after a few years out I’ve been struck by some physical changes. The gym has grown, colonising rooms that used to be used for functions and group classes. The number of television screens has increased from one to six, all playing different channels that users can listen in to on their earphones through the jacks on every exercise machine. A hits-based radio station fills in the gaps between the machine noises and the grunts and groans. The machines themselves – treadmills, bikes, rowers, cross trainers – have become more advanced, able to tell users more about their bodies and their regimes. The type of people using the gym has remained pretty static – an interesting mix of ages, abilities, and sexes, with a smattering of poseurs – while their numbers have increased. More people have personal trainers now than they did when I first joined. In all, the compare and contrast picture I get when I look back from today to my first membership in 1993 is one of an increasing interest in exercise and well-being, as witness the gym’s physical expansion, along with an increasing personalisation of the exercise experience, as people with personal earphones or personal trainers perform to improve the personal data on their machine’s display.

I’m not criticising this: I’m part of it, after all. While I feel some smugness that I walk to the gym and don’t rely on a car, I’m still someone who is choosing to run on a machine rather than make the more natural and less cluttered act of cross-country running, and someone who likes the globalised experience of a sauna at the end of a session. What I am doing is trying to stress that these everyday bits of contemporary life have a history, a history that is personal, social, economic, scientific, cultural, and political. Never take the easy option of ignoring the recent in history: it can be just as telling about continuity and change, and about communities, as the older stuff.

Now, what was my PB for 5km with a 2.5 incline on the treadmill again? Pass me a heart monitor, someone, I’ve got some personal data to upload.

Comments

[Fitness strength training]

I really liked this post. I changed gyms about 6 months ago (the one I used to go to became way too busy). And already I have a history there. I remember going there in the winter time and coming outside and freezing. It's also one of the few places other than the workplace that I go often enough to almost recognize everyone there when I go, kinda like Cheers!