The Eighth One - Gym Dating Etiquette

The sweat drips down my face as I lift the barbell repeatedly into the air. I really wish it was my own sweat. A male lurker gawks down at me while I pump some iron. I don’t want to acknowledge his presence, but the sweat drips make it difficult.
“Feeling the burn?” he asks with a sly smile.
Gym conversations always seem to be weary and forced, so I don’t usually participate in them. Ignorance seems like my best option, so I pretend not to hear him.
“Feeling the burn?” he repeats, looking right down at me.
Ignorance is no longer an option, so I opt for the most primitive form of communication.
“Yeah,” I grunt.
I’m not feeling a tinkle of the burn yet, but I hope that a little white lie will stop all the chatter.
It fathoms me that my new friend is trying to win over the ladies at the gym. The gym is not a place where someone typically looks their best. For example, I’m sporting dirty cut off sweat pants that missed my laundry basket two weeks in a row. My black sports bra is visible through my white Calvin and Hobbes t-shirt that I slept in last night, and I’m plastered with dirt from mountain biking this morning. The Gawker is a large man with a perspiration problem. His orange Denver Bronco’s football jersey matches his homemade tan, and he is working out in acid-washed jeans. I’m in no mood to be romanced by a guy in acid-washed jeans.
I try a little gym feng shui: change location and change atmosphere. I spot an empty bench at the back of the room, and I swipe it but it isn’t long before I regret the move. To my left is a young woman with dyed-blonde hair, tight black pants and a little pink tank top. Because she’s doing sumo squats, her bottom stretches to twice the size of its regular width on two-second intervals, which makes me believe that her pants are going to rip at the seams. Facing me is another man in jeans (I never understood jeans at the gym) but his fly is down and his little man is trying to say hello. And the Gawker found room to my right for lunges. There’s no politically correct direction for me to look, so I put my head down and pretend to feel the burn. Half-way through the set, the Gawker attempts a second conversation.
“My name is Shane,” he offers, holding out his slippery hand.
I know this was something that I won’t be able to ignore or grunt my way through, so I grin and participate in the introduction.
“Come here often?” asks Shane with that same sly smile.
“A few times a week,” I reply, looking for the next opportunity to end the conversation.
“Hey, can you spot me while I bench this?” he says while pointing to a custom barbell that weighs twice as much as I do.
“Sure,” I pipe, and immediately wonder why I can never say no. I position myself behind Shane as he grunts out a number every time he exhales.
“One…two…four…”
I’m not going to question what happened to No. 3. When he gets to No. 11 he can’t lift the bar anymore, so my puny muscles lift that bar up to the safety stops, and that hurt my arms more than my entire workout.
“Hey,” he says as I puff after my feat, “did you know that the girl calf muscles are stronger than guy calf muscles?”
“No, Shane, I didn’t know that my girl calves are stronger,” I say, almost glaring at him.
“I just say that because you have really nice calves.”
Nice calves? I look down to see that my calves still have caked on mud and haven’t been shaved in ten days. I don’t know if it was a compliment I actually want to accept. A girl loves to hear about her dazzling blue eyes, a bright big smile, and her strong fit abs, but her muddy, hairy calf muscles, well that was a new one.
“Well, I’m done my workout,” I blurt abruptly, although I just arrived 20 minutes before, but my want to avoid more awkward conversations is stronger than my need to exercise.
I have to find a gym with better dating etiquette, but next time I need a date I know I can get one and a workout at the same time.