Dear Middle-Aged Poofy-Haired Man at the YMCA:

Hello.  My name is Cristina.  Not sure if you noticed me, but I was the one impaled on the Expresso bike sweating torrents and glaring at you through the glass pane.  You probably didn’t, but I sure noticed you.  I noticed you in your really tight work out pants (by the way, next time please do us all a favor and wear UNDERWEAR - cuz that was NASTY), your $1M dollar sales t-shirt, your extra-poofy hair, your weight lifting gloves and your cell phone.  Yeah, I saw you. I saw more of you than I ever wanted to see.

It would have been hard to miss you.  Generally when people go to the Y, they don’t spend their entire time in the hallway between the weight lifting room and the gym shouting into their cell phone, talking with their hands, and making lots of silly hand gestures (if you did the two thumbs up sign one more time while balancing the phone on your shoulder, I was going to whip a courtesy copy of Cosmo at your head.  Are you aware that the person on the other end of the phone CAN’T SEE YOU?).  I guess I don’t get it.  Did you need the weight lifting gloves to get better traction on your cell phone?  Are you that important that you must spend the entire 48 minutes I was on the bike chatting with 6, count ‘em, 6 different people?  (I counted, buddy.)

And because you bugged me THAT much, I actually timed how many minutes you were actually lifting weights.  I hate to break it to you: it was 4 1/2.  Seriously.  4 1/2 minutes of weight lifting and 43 1/2 minutes of verbal diarrhea on the cell phone while strutting in front of me with your tight pants and little soldier at half mast.  Are you aware how difficult the Expresso bikes are, and how irritating it is to see your big poofy head bobbing around on your neck right outside the glass that separated us?  Every time I focused on the monitor, another phone call came in, and you were there - sometimes not even noticing my hairy eyeball as you stared vacantly through the glass, less than 2 feet from me.  I know your momma taught you not to adjust yourself publicly. 

Mr. Cell Phone guy, working out does not come naturally to all of us.  And while you followed Y protocol by not taking calls while actually on the weight machines, you irritated the living crap out of me.  I was trying to stay focused on my course and my heart rate, and your stupid strutting walk was only missing the chest pounding.  Having a cell phone was cool in, like, 1993.  Everyone has them now - not sure if you’ve noticed, but no one gives a crap if you closed a big deal this week or how important you are that you must take calls during your “workout”. 

As a fellow fatty, I also might suggest you would get more mileage out of your membership if you spent less time exercising your jaws and strutting and more time actually working on that gut of yours.  Do us all a favor next time and sit in your car on your phone feeling important.  Perhaps you are even the guy who had a personalized license plate that said “Shlong” (those on Facebook have seen it, so they know I’m not lying), because that’s exactly the type of guy I think you are.  Leave the rest of us to sweat and grunt and have near-death experiences trying to beat our prior time in peace.

Best of luck in your future workout endeavors.

Yours truly,

Cristina

An illustration of how close this guy was to me:

And proof that someone at the Y actually drives a car with “Shlong” on the license plate: