The hardest hardcore gym I have known
As many posts here dictate, the gym scene is full of pencil-neck wank-stains doing the super-sets of 21s to blow their guns up, after pigging out on their monstrous breakfast of 4, count ‘em, 1, 2, 3, 4 pieces of toast.
These malnourished wisps-of-wanna-be-men all train ‘hardcore’, and bitch if there is no carpet on the floor, the water from the fountain is not chilled, and mummy does not pin their latest crayon drawing to the refrigerator.
And so, comes my tale of many gyms, in many cities, in many lands. In 15 years of training, I have lifted in gyms in Canada and the US, and I have lifted in piss-ant pacific atolls where the King would come along a with ahalf the army and boot everyone out while he fought a half-hearted battle with obesity. I have lifted in the air-conditioned 5-star hotels ‘fitness studios’ across the world where corporate whores wept and trembled at my presence. I have trained in gyms in Asia where the owner openly deals in Anabolic Steroids over the counter, D-bol is like candy, and some dirty bastard is deep-frying chicken drumsticks outside beside an open sewer (and the drumsticks were very nice: I had them for lunch each day), and I have trained in gyms notorious for the high homosexual count and known throughout the land for posers, poofters, and prancing pillocks.
Although I don’t rain there any more due to its inconvenient location, the hardest gym I have ever trained in is in the city I reside in now. This gym is the domain of Olympic lifters, Power Lifters, and Strongmen. Access is just off the motorway, and on some council land between a badminton hall and table-tennis hall. Picture, if you will, hordes of Chinese badminton and table-tennis players, (interspersed with the odd Indian and sickly Europeans with bulging Adam’s apples, because nobody else with any self respect dallies about doing that bollocks) pulling up in their cars, milling about, gabbling away like the strangled canaries they resemble, and then disappearing into the safe confines of a hall only to stand put and wave an arm in the air in the deluded belief they are participating in a sport of physical exertion.
Between these two large, well lit, extravagant demonstrations of futility, sits heaven. A short, squat, ugly glorified garage-cum-workshop. Inside this dark and dusty dungeon is a battered kitchen reminiscent of a 1950’s housing ‘project’, and the communal showers that so petrify those with a small penis. Importantly there are three raised wooden lifting platforms lit by a single (working) florescent tube each, and two freestanding squat racks on two of them. Everything is covered in layer of chalk dust, or just plain dust. Dotted around the edge are assorted dumbbells, some of which are homemade and the others ‘sourced’ from various locations and failed commercial enterprises. The walls are adorned with plaques and mementoes from years gone by. The only machines are a home made cable pull-down and a broken leg extension. A bench-press has pride of place second to the platforms, its welds open and rusty. The bench of the bench press is a piece of ˝ inch timber perhaps 10 inches wide. There is no carpet laid over the bare concrete floor, nor is there even padding on the bench of the bench-press.
If it is cold, you put on more clothes, if it is hot you take them off. If it is stuffy, you open the door. Strewn inside the door are chains, tractor tires, drums, and rocks. These are carried outside and flipped, tossed, and hoisted to the incredulous looks of stunted Chinamen and their idiotic team mates. Woe betide the fool who tries to drive their car in front of a 130kg Strongman carrying 200kg in each hand for a Farmers Walk!! Park your car in the way of a flipping tire off an earthmover, and see the damage it will do to a bucket-of-shit with a red dangly thing handing from the mirror! Inside, men and a few women squat, bench, snatch and clean for hours at a time. Banana skins litter the benches, and the music is provided by a derelict transistor radio permanently stuck on one station.
The only redeeming thing about this gym is the history that has been through it, and the knowledge that resides in the minds of its denizens. Olympic level athletes have trained there for 50years, and old men of 60 to 70 regularly snatch or clean-and-jerk twice their bodyweight. Younger men break national power-lifting records there. The faded signs on the walls state “no smoking while training” and the biggest sin one could commit would be using the Olympic bars in the power racks for fear of damaging the knurling. Access is pretty much by invitation, which can get you a private key, enabling 24 hours a day. I have passed by and seen people training at 3am.
I have trained in filthier, and I have trained in more spartan. I have trained in gyms with bigger reputations. But that would be the hardest hardcore gym I have trained at.