Words by: Nate LeBoeuf
Graphic by: Midjourney
Graphic by: Midjourney
And I was not one of them.
As The Fault in Our Stars would put it, Instagram became obsessed with at-home workouts “the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.” At first, the trend was sporadic: a progress pic here, a “Trot Your Way To Tighter Buns” post there. As weeks passed, it became ubiquitous. Every time I opened my phone, I felt like I had doom scrolled into the center of a SoulCycle studio.
Although my athletic career doesn’t go further than Pop Warner football, I decided to give the trend a shot. Each video told me that if I stuck with it for two weeks, I would be “swole”. After an intense, concentrated 14 days, I was as lanky and rawboned as I began, shamefully eating a bag of veggie sticks. I certainly had not become “swole”. What does swole even mean? I wondered. Is 18 too old to not know what swole means? How is the divine power of being swole transmitted to gym sharks everywhere? Was it passed down from their fathers? Were they born with this information hardwired into their DNA? What culture does the term “swole” originate from? Is it Welsh? Is there a secret society where all gym sharks become gym sharks at the age of… fuck, 14? Did my gim shark invitation get lost in the mail? Where is the video that explains this stuff at the “Gym Shark Lingo 101” level?
When it began, I was indifferent and in denial at this fitness trend. Another “easy” workout. LOL. Then, as more and more people shared their body progress and how working out made their quarantines not so bad, my laughs out loud became more beleaguered, more passive-aggressive. All of a sudden, they had transformed into cries for help.
Was everyone a gym shark but me? What the fuck was wrong with me?
My woes over exercise might have been easier to handle if it were solely about the feeling of being the odd one out. But that’s not the situation here- my panic was never really about exercise itself. It was about the archetype of the exercise enthusiast — an archetype I feared I could never fulfill.
I’ve never been the athletic type. I miss the soccer ball when I kick it. I struggle to stack chairs because they’re too heavy. Staring at a bench press induces the same feeling in me that typing out a first Hinge message usually does: a premature sense of defeat.
Whenever I’d tried to exercise in the past, there had been another issue, too. Even if I did force myself to get out of bed and do a workout, my body would lack the second half of the famous saying— play hard. “Work hard, play hard!” is a motto that most athletes swear by, but I found myself in a state of embarrassment after. In fact, I don’t think I “played” at all when I was doing my workout challenge; my process would be more aptly observed as “work hard, cry hard” or “work hard, stress-eat ice cream hard”. My endorphins left me in the dust after lifting weights. I refused to walk unless absolutely necessary after leg days. It was all process to me, a process without pleasure — and if you find that sad, reader, understand that I did, too.
I realized that exercising was not natural for me. I realized that enthusiasm towards exercising was likely not natural for me, either. And I had no interest in obtaining either of these things. To do so would have been to confront my insufficiency — at least, regarding my physical pursuits. Despite my perplexity at gym sharks’ lifestyles, I understood their appeal. Their determination, their willingness. Their reinforcement of strength as power. These were attributes, I knew, that have been known as the masculine ideal for centuries- attributes that have held a masculine significance in the modern era- attributes that I intensely admired. They were also attributes that I knew I didn’t naturally own - and this became extremely transparent to me during quarantine, when I had too much time to assess myself and my body.
My largest fear was that I had nothing to give. Gym sharks were tough, like the weights they lift from their steel benches with an enormous sense of brawn. They can provide. They can protect. They’re the biblical David reincarnated. They’re confident, dependable, big shots, and I am limp and haphazard and the list goes on. What if I, who knew not the Quest of the Gym Sharks, would never be able to be this confident with my body?
Whenever I attempted to glance into the future, I caught sight of the bleakest timeline; I am doomed to live a life of loneliness because I will never be the husband a man wants to come home to. I will make Him laugh when I see Him at parties. If I am lucky He will hook up with me once. Maybe for a fleeting month, my personality could be His Eros. But He will not love me. When we hit our late twenties, I’ll come home from work to binge the nth season of White Lotus and He’ll cozy up to his much sexier partner. In the morning, He’ll wake up to an equally beautiful, Herculean figure sleeping beside Him. Then, they will put on their clothes and take on the day. He’ll go throughout his day, sweaty from a long day of labor. When He walks through the door, He’ll find his true love getting ready for bed. “Hey, honey”, He’ll say in a deep tone that could never be mine as He crashes onto the bed; “I’m home”.
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I wish I could end this piece with an epiphany I had around mid-April. That I recognized the flawed concept of the quarantine productivity myth and my worries instantly dissolved; or that I eventually discovered my long-lost passion for ab workouts. Yet there was no magical moment of clarity for me — no eye-opening conversation with a friend or Seuss-esque confrontation with a talking elephant. The truth is, everybody just kind of stopped talking about working out — maybe people lost motivation, or perhaps were just bored of posting about it. It was then that my exercise-induced anxiety diminished (Yes, believe it or not, there was a direct correlation between social media and my mental health).
Looking back, it’s obvious that my angst derived from being a gay teenager with little sexual experimentation and, therefore, an extreme lack of confidence in myself. As this crisis was unraveling, I still hadn’t chosen a college to attend- I am now writing this piece as a college graduate with 4 more years of experience being in my body. I can proudly say I used my school’s $50m gym less than five times. Not all hope is lost, though. I’ve become an avid walker, I take the stairs instead of the elevator, occasionally engage in the Sisyphean task of yoga.
My 2020 insecurities still loom, but the pandemic wasn’t all miserable. It was during the lockdown that I sought out my own methods of self-care and self-discovery. My quarantine days hadn’t been spent in a tank top and runner’s shorts. They hadn’t been replete with the glow of sweat. But that didn’t mean they had been wasted.