planet fitness Incident

I’ll start by saying I was reluctant to join Planet Fitness in the first place.

But, one of my friends here in Nashville named Tyler pushed me to get a membership so we could workout together. His pitch: “they give you free fruit snacks at the front door and they have hydro massage beds that you can use before you leave.” I didn’t have a gym membership so I wanted to try out several different gyms in Nashville. I decided to make Planet Fitness first on my list. Although Nashville is a major city comprised of young professionals who are health conscious, there aren’t that many great gym options available in the city.

So, with a little encouragement from Tyler and few other alternatives to choose from, I decided to join the Planet Fitness located a few minutes away from my house.

It’s relatively clean, has most of the equipment I need, and it’s open 24 hours a day. When I signed up, I was warned that because of the pandemic, they no longer serve complimentary bagels and orange juice in the lounge area on Tuesday mornings. We’re not off to a great start.

I started to attend the Planet Fitness regularly. More often than not, I went alone.

One day, when I walked into the gym at around 9pm, I noticed this guy sitting in the locker room dressed head to toe in yellow camouflage. The kind that you only see when Pittsburgh Steelers fans are looking for a matching pair of pants to go with their Steelers jersey. The pants looked like they were 5 sizes too big for him and the way he had them on, the waistband was situated just inches above his knees. The coat he had on could double as an igloo to keep him warm in the arctic tundra if he wanted. The way he was sitting on the bench in front of the lockers, I could tell he had a disability but I wasn’t sure what exactly that disability was. It was clearly a defect that impaired his ability to walk. His upper body seemed to be functioning fine but his lower body just laid limp as if his legs were stuffed with cotton like a ventriloquist doll. He had his hood over his head and he was just sitting, hunched over, looking down at this lap. I looked at him for a second and I remember thinking “this is fucking strange” and kept moving. I exited the locker room and started my session on the stepper.

Minutes later, I watched the man, dressed head to toe in his yellow arctic camouflage outfit exit the locker room. The cadence to his walk was similar to that of one of the 4 legged robots in Star Wars where they just swing back and forth. He came out of the locker room wearing his pants down around his knees the way you’d wear your pants in a public stall in a situation where you’d just taken a shit but you realize that there’s no toilet paper in your stall so you have to waddle to the next stall over without getting shit all over your pants or your legs. He staggered over to one of the hand bikes, sat down, and pedaled the hand bike until I left.

I didn’t think about him again until a few days later. I had the day off and decided to go to the gym in the middle of the day. I remember having a good workout but in my head, I remember being a little anxious because I was ready to finish the workout and get on to the next part of my day. I was slightly on edge. I was on my last set of dips and I was looking at my phone to pick the next song. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the same guy dressed similarly to the way he’d been dressed the time I’d seen him before but in a different color camo. He was wearing his pants the same way and, this time, he was using an umbrella as a walking cane. He came stumbling around the corner and approached the area where I was standing. I’m not sure why, but all of the sudden I thought to myself, “man, it would really suck if this guy just decided to grab me right now”. I don’t usually have these sorts of thoughts so I remember getting upset at myself for having it. He walked past me and I continued scrolling through my phone to find the perfect song to finish the last set of my workout to. He made his way to where he was going, grabbed a sit-up mat, and started walking back past me. All of the sudden, I felt someone grab a fistful of the back of my shirt and start pulling on it the way you’d pull on someone’s shirt if you were trying to keep from falling over. Before I could react, the grip of my shirt was abandoned. I turned around and, before I could react, I watched the man dressed in camo stumble backwards for what felt like a minute until he fell and smashed his head off of one of the weight racks. My jaw dropped. Before I could react, two Planet Fitness employees rushed to his side to make sure he was ok. I ran over to help him up. I was immediately met with the odiferous vodka, cigarettes, and I haven’t showered in several weeks. I asked him if he was ok. He rejected any help that the employees or I offered him. We collected his oversized headphones and umbrella which both went flying across the room as he fell, helped him get back to his feet, then he walked away like nothing ever happened. We all just looked at each other in shock at what we just witnessed. It was one of the strangest interactions that I can remember ever being a part of in my entire life. There was so much to unpack.

As I watched him walk away and I got back to my last set of dips, I couldn’t help but think about what a train wreck I thought he was. “What a terrible person. Coming into Planet Fitness in the middle of the day, completely blacked out.” I thought to myself. “I’d be so ashamed of myself if I was him” I continued. Then, I thought about it a little more. I started to think about how little I actually know about this guy. Sure, I’ve seen him twice now and by his external appearance, he doesn’t look like the most savory of individuals. But, what does someone’s appearance really tell me about this guy? Without ever exchanging a word with him, I made a judgement about him and his life and immediately wrote him off as a burden on society. What I failed to consider, thought, is how did he end up the way he did. For all I know, he was brutally beaten as a child by an abusive set of adoptive parents. The beatings were so bad that they left him permanently disabled and abandon him just in time for the local child protection services agency to find and rescue him. But, before they could get him to the hospital to receive medical treatment, the damage had been done and the beatings left him permanently disabled. The thought of spending the rest of his life disabled coupled with the traumatic effect of being beaten by people that were supposed to be your protectors were too much for him to emotionally handle. What began as a coping mechanism to deal with all of the emotional trauma as a young child turned into a full blown alcohol addiction. By the time he was 18 and pushed through a school system that wasn’t designed to effectively manage a disorder like his, he was using alcohol to both numb the physical and emotional pain that his disability causes him. After attempting to work entry-level jobs at a few different places, he decided that a life as a working professional was never going to be a reality for him. In the end, I’ll probably never find out the reasons why he is the way he is. And, that’s enough of a lesson for me.

Maybe, the most he can muster the energy to do in a day is get dressed and walk into Planet Fitness for an upper body workout. Maybe, the only thing that brings him any physical or emotional reprieve is the time he gets to spend pedaling the hand bike. It’s the only time he gets to take his mind off of all of the pain he has endured in his life.

After considering all of this, I decided that I’m going to do my best not to make internal judgements about people before I know their real story. I owe it to myself and I owe it to the world to make that effort.