One Hour

One hour per session, three sessions a week

I arrive at the gym grumpy. This is not sometimes. This is the condition of arrival, as fixed as the fluorescent lights and the smell of rubber flooring and the man on the bench who has been doing the same set of curls, by my count, for the entire duration of Western civilization.

I book Bree mid-morning so that my body will move while my brain is still in whatever I’m writing. The session is the interruption. I am grumpy because I did not want to come. I am grumpy because I did want to come and I resent that I wanted to, because wanting to do something good for yourself has a faint whiff of smugness that I cannot abide in others and tolerate poorly in myself. I am grumpy because my psoas is tight, or because someone in my house asked me a question this morning that required an answer and I did not have one. I am grumpy because I am a writer, and writers are professionally grumpy, and also because I am a mother, and mothers are grumpy for free.

I am thirty-eight. Most of Bree’s clients are older women, and I joke that I have a geriatric body, which is the kind of joke you only make if you are also a little bit serious. My ferritin is low. My hip spasms. My hair is thinning. I have the joints of a woman fifteen years older and a calendar that does not believe it.

Bree’s first question is always the same. How are we doing today? I grumble something. She calls me a spicy meatball in an Elmo voice until I have to laugh. The laugh is the first crack in the grumpiness, and it happens before I have lifted anything.

She hands me a foam roller the way a bartender hands you a drink you ordered wordlessly, and I lie down on the mat and begin rolling it between my hip and the floor.

Then we go to work. Pushing or pulling today, depending on what she has decided. Three of four exercises in a cycle, repeat three times, then another cycle, sometimes with more weight, sometimes with less, depending on my injuries and what state I arrived in. I do not choose. She chooses. This is also one of the reasons I see her. Decision fatigue is the writer’s standing condition, and the gym is the one hour of my week where I do not have to think of what comes next.

Around minute forty I start yawning. I used to think it meant I was tired. I think now it is something else. The body is shifting from one register to another. The movement has finally outpaced the stress I walked in with, and the nervous system is letting go. The yawn starts somewhere in my chest and settles in my legs.

We finish the big lifts and I drink some water. Bree hands me a foam roller and points at my hip. I close my eyes and lean into the wall and get lost in the pleasure-pain of releasing the trigger point against it. This is the part of the hour I would never have given myself. Left to my own devices I would have left at minute forty and called it good. Bree does not let me leave at minute forty. She does not let me leave grumpy and she does not let me leave half-restored. The last fifteen minutes are not the cost of the hour. They are the point of it.

Most of Bree’s clients are older women. There is a version of womanhood I grew up watching in which a woman’s body is the final authority on what she can do, and that authority is always issuing restraining orders. Don’t lift that. Don’t eat that. Don’t want that. Don’t take up space like that. I inherited this body and this authority both, and for most of my life I mistook the authority for the body itself, which is why, when my body said stop, I stopped, and called it wisdom.

Bree’s philosophy, which she has said often enough that I can recite it back to her: “I want to leave you better than I found you”. It is the standard she holds the hour against. The diagnostic at the start, the lifts, the yawning shift, the lacrosse ball, the stretch. All of it is calibrated to a single test. Whether the body that walks out is more whole than the body that walked in.

At the end of the session, she asks the question. How are we feeling now? Better. Always better.


Bree Steinke trains me in Edmonton. She writes at": variety hour.