Late-night shift

For most people, being in the gym in the late evening or the small hours of night is a mark of dedication. For me, it’s an indignity: an admission not only that I’ve failed to properly manage my time in the daylight, but also that I’m body conscious enough to forgo sleep to lift and slam steel in my endless pursuit of a V-taper and perfect male breasts. Never mind that though; I find that the gym at night is full of the most anthropological intrigue. People watching in the day, when it is mostly full of personal trainers and work-from-home corporate shills getting in their 45 minutes between meetings, is fruitless. At night, you start to see real characters.

On my late-night shifts, I’ve started to notice a group of Turkish men who are always huddled around the vending machines, chatting about women, and football, and whatever else. I hardly ever see them using any equipment – it feels like they have some kind of regular late-night agreement to meet at a commercial south London gym for a regular catch-up. Then there are the teenagers. They’re a mild irritation, mainly because they typically take turns – they’re usually in groups of five, six or seven – around one piece of equipment. Most times that’s the flat barbell bench press, of which there’s only one in my gym, and they can be on it from the time I enter to the time I leave. But it’s kind of nice, seeing how they encourage each other and hype each other through their sets, pushing them on to lift a bar with 5kg plates on each side with conviction. I don’t know why they’re here at this time, or if their parents know they’re out pumping iron at 1am on a school night, but I suppose there are worse ways children could be spending their evenings. Plus, it’s not like I’m going to tell.

Then, of course, there are the loners. I was about to go on to describe them as zany, but then I thought, well, aren’t I one of them? Am I less of a late-night gym weirdo because it’s been the fault of time management rather than a deliberate choice? I suppose someone else could be observing me in my leopard-print blue shorts, skipping around and flapping my arms as I listen to Camila Cabello’s latest dream-pop album, speaking out loud to myself, reimagining whatever argument I should’ve pursued with more force in the daytime, and thought to themselves: “I’ve got to stop coming to the gym at this time.” I guess that’s something I’ve come to embrace about night-time gym: its godlessness, its lack of any facade suggesting this ritual has anything to do with order and regimen and discipline. In fact it has a lot more to do with compulsion, obsession, neuroticism, eroticism (it’s a great time for a late-night rendezvous in the showers). It doesn’t typically have the tripod cameras of fitness influencers or the Olympian flexing of steroid bros; there’s just a mix of people getting on with it and the erratic jitteriness of the sleep deprived. On my last late-night session, I saw a woman’s intrusive thoughts to moonwalk on the treadmill win, and she fell flat on her face. That’s the joy of the late-night social contract of the gym. You can get up to whatever you want, and we can keep it between us.