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During a particular period in early March—right after New York City reported its first case of COVID-19 on March 1st, but before my home state of Pennsylvania issued its statewide stay-at-home order effective March 17—the gym became a strange place for me.
At that time, our Department of Health assured us that the state wasn’t yet detecting community spread—meaning, all the infections they were seeing were caused by people having direct contact with someone known to have COVID-19—so all businesses, including gyms, remained open. We were simply told to practice good hygiene habits as preventive measures, like washing our hands, avoiding touching our faces, cleaning surfaces frequently, and staying away from people who looked visibly sick
So, like I’d done nearly every day for the past who-knows-how-many years, I kept going to the gym. It was my happy place, where I’d go to challenge my muscles and calm my mind.
For many there, it seemed like business as usual. But as someone who’s spent a decade working in health journalism—and with loved ones with risk factors that put them at high-risk for serious complications for COVID-19—I was a little more wary.
That’s why I decided to do a completely scientifically-unsound experiment: On Thursday, March 12, I shut off my iPod Shuffle and paid close, semi-lurky attention to the people around me at my big-box gym.
I spent about 50 minutes on the floor. During that time, I watched to see what people did when they were done with their equipment. The cardio section got an A+. Every person I saw get off their treadmill or elliptical—maybe seven or eight people—took the walk to the front desk for a spray bottle and paper towel to wipe their machine down.
The free weights section was a dumpster fire. There were maybe 20 people milling around—putting back dumbbells, loading up barbells, sharing cable attachments, and pretty much touching everything in sight as they made their way through their workouts. During that 50 minutes, I saw one person wipe something down. And it was a bench.
That was the last time I went there.
The next day, I tried my other gym—one that’s way less crowded and stocked with easily accessible disinfectant wipes. (Yep, I belong to two gyms, thanks in part to a grandfathered-in $10 monthly fee at my original one, and, as I mentioned before, the fact that I really love the gym.) But it was pretty much the same thing there: People were good about cleaning up their sweat, like when it’s sprayed all over the dash of their treadmill, but tended to overlook the more subtle stuff, like what could be lurking on the dumbbell they reached for. (Sweat, as I learned when reporting on the new coronavirus and gyms before, is not a known mode of transmission, but common touch surfaces can be.)
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So I became hyper-aware of what I was doing. I wiped down my barbell. Then I realized I should have adjusted the cage first—those pegs are also touch surfaces—so I went back for another wipe to get them. But…what about the weight plates? I needed another wipe for them too. Then, should I wash my hands after wiping everything down? Would hand sanitizer suffice? What if I accidentally touched my face when a stray strand of hair escaped my ponytail?
By the time I was actually ready to start my set, I was frazzled. And the rest of my workout was more of the same: How do you sanitize a rope attachment? Should I just do all my sets at the same weight so I don’t have to wipe down more weight plates? Do the rest of the gym-goers think I’m sick because I’m disinfecting like a fiend? I think I heard a cough behind me—and I’m pretty sure it’s the same guy who was working on the bench right beside me earlier.
I can remember all those thoughts that raced through my mind that evening at the gym—my last one—but I can’t tell you a damn thing about the workout itself. Did I eke out that fifth and final rep on the bench press I’d been shooting for? Was I still feeling something weird in my low back when I rowed the barbell? Who knows. The only thing I can say for sure was I spent more time thinking about possibly contracting or transmitting the new coronavirus than I did about my actual workout.
The gym is usually where I decompress, but the gym in the time of new coronavirus really stressed the hell out of me.
So when gyms in my area are finally allowed to reopen, I’m not sure I’ll be joining them—at least not right away.
Now, I know it’s not completely fair to extrapolate future behavior based on past actions. When people return to the gym, they very well may understand the severity of the situation, and make their actions follow suit. Back in March, I really don’t think the general population, at least in my neck of the woods, knew the extent of what was coming. If they did, maybe they’d have been a little more careful during their final weeks at the gym, wiping down their equipment, keeping distance from others, and staying home with that hacking cough. Or maybe my gym would have been a little better at enforcing cleaning measures—or at least have more than one roll of paper towels available for the entire gym.
But with what we know now, I trust that gyms are going to do what they can to make their places safe for their patrons (as well as their staff and trainers) when they return. Gyms and fitness studios like Gold’s, Equinox, and SoulCycle shared their upcoming policies with me for a story I recently reported on the reopening of gyms, and I can honestly say their changes—which include things like spacing out machines, scanless entry, ramped-up sanitation, and updated codes of conduct—will make a lot of exercisers breathe a little easier.
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Will it be enough for me? Honestly, I wish it were. While I know it’s a privilege to even say so, especially while others are dealing with crises and serious, life-altering consequences of this pandemic, I admit I miss the gym and the sense of normalcy it represents with an almost embarrassing longing. Without that part of my routine, I feel like I’m both stressing and stagnating. The adrenaline rush—that unexpected, confidence-boosting eruption of beast mode—when you press 25s on the bar for the first time sans spotter can’t really be replicated by the sad pile of tiny dumbbells that make up my at-home workout.
But at least at the beginning, when everyone first returns and acclimates to the new normal, I think the stress of the gym environment will negate its feel-good benefits that I’ve relied on for so long. All of the precautions available can’t erase the fact that there is some risk of contracting COVID-19 when you go to the gym, just as there is when you go to any public place. And right now, that stresses me out.
As Amesh Adalja, M.D., an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told me recently, your decision to go back to the gym all comes down to your personal risk preference: How much risk do you want to take on?
My personal risk preference, I think, would be much higher if the possible consequences of getting sick affected only me. I’m not really afraid of getting the illness myself; I’m more worried about passing it on to others—maybe the woman in her 70s who hangs her purse on the arm of the treadmill each night as she reads her way through an hour of incline walking, or the former powerlifter in his 60s who’s just coming back from knee surgery. Or maybe I unknowingly spread it to the cashier in the grocery store, or to my loved ones once social distancing is relaxed—my dad, who’s fighting cancer, or my husband, who’s had pneumonia twice in the last six years.
I know there’s a little bit of selfishness keeping me back, too. As I learned at the gym in early March, the constant stress of watching your every single move—did I touch that, was I far enough away from him, was that a sneeze—is really, really mentally draining for someone who’s a worrier (to put it nicely) during the smoothest of times.
I will go back to the gym eventually, but before that happens, I need to feel more secure that my actions will not be as big a risk as they are now. That depends on a lot of things: maybe it’s waiting for cases in my area to decline to a certain level (we’re still a PA-described “red zone”), when enough time has passed for scientists to gauge safety data in areas where gyms have reopened sooner, or if my gyms’ reopening policies limit interaction in a way enough to reassure me. Right now, it’s all pretty uncertain and nebulous—just like the coronavirus pandemic overall.
As Dr. Adalja explained, your perception of risk will change as the pandemic progresses, too, so what I feel now is unlikely to mirror my thoughts in a month’s time. So I’m giving myself time to feel what I feel now, and the flexibility to allow that to shift in the future. Until then, I’m using this time to add back things to my fitness routine that have fallen by the wayside in normal times: I’m walking more—easy, relaxing cardio that I never made the time for before—and, with the temptation of heavy weights gone, I’m fine-tuning my squat to fix an ever-present kink. And when I feel ready—when pushing weights goes back to calming me down instead of stressing me out—I’ll go back.
