This time of year, some of the women I regularly chat with at the gym like to complain about the influx of new exercisers after New Year's, as if the new people somehow didn't deserve to use the facilities as much as those of us who have been working out longer. There's also the implication that the new people are not as serious about fitness as our hearty little crew of regulars.

This makes me nuts, because going to the gym for the first time--hell, for the first 25 times--was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It was over three years ago and at least one full year before the thought of quitting drinking ever crossed my mind. And it seems clear now that it was the first challenging step on the long trudge to the height of daily difficulty upon which I now slump, tired but happy.

First, and most importantly, I had been vehemently anti-sporty since birth. Like many people, I have painful memories of elementary-school gym class (and our teacher, Mr. Lias, who made the whole class run laps when the retarded kid inevitably confused his right and left hands) and rather joyous memories of high-school gym class: whacking sporty girls on the legs with a hockey stick. I was anti-gym as an adult, too--all those pathetic people with no lives running on treadmills like hamsters on wheels. But, and this is what brought me to the gym as well as what made me want to run away screaming to the nearest bar, I was fat. Not the curvy plumpness of a naturally large woman but the slack flab of someone who'd slapped forty pounds of booze and ramen on a previously thin body in the space of three or four years.

It may seem surprising, or at least it does to me, that I managed to stick with an ambitious exercise and weightlifting program, improve my diet dramatically, and lose forty pounds while drinking like a fish and doing lots of drugs. But I did it, and it was only afterwards that the dichotomy in my life became obvious to me and I began to think, "Hey, maybe I'd feel even better if..."

So, the moral of the story is, be nice to new people at the gym. They may go on to create inspirational online journals that you can read at work.

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