Amy Lu's View

I don’t like solving puzzles (unless Wordle counts). I usually just give up. 

But last night I was confronted with a puzzle/problem that I was very motivated to solve: How was I going to work out at the gym when my workout clothes consisted of tennis shoes, socks, a pair of capri length tights, and a swimsuit bottom?

To spell it out, I was missing a crucial component of my workout wardrobe: clothes to wear on the top half of my body. I had no workout clothes to wear above my waist.

This was my first trip to the gym in quite a while, and clearly my gym bag packing skills were rusty. It’s not that I forgot to bring a workout shirt and sports bra, it’s that I thought the black thing I grabbed from my pile of broadly defined activity clothing was a tank top with a built in sports bra, when it actually was the bottom half of a swimsuit. Hey, they were all the same color (black) and type of material, although, yes, the size was a bit different. 

After I quickly went through the stages of “discovering a gym bag missing crucial workout” gear grief (which included searching my bag repeatedly for a hidden workout top) I decided I had four options:

1. Give up and go home to work out on our exercise bike
2. Go home and get a workout top and sports bra and return to gym
3. Go to the nearby Target and buy something to wear on my upper body and return to the gym
4. Work out wearing what I had with me

I couldn’t bear the wasted time that options 1-3 would require and I didn’t want to be out in the cold weather any longer than necessary, and I’ve spent way too much time recently in our basement on our exercise bike. Could I possibly make option #4 work?

Thankfully, yes I could, because: 

1. My normal bra (a Jockey Bralette, please see footnote)* that I was wearing was very close to a sports bra (and I don’t have that much to sport) and
2. I was wearing an old thin shirt under my sweater 

I was dubious, but desperate, so bravely gave the workout a try. “Even if I only get a couple of miles in before I get too hot and too tired of adjusting my bra, that will be something,” I told myself. Surprisingly, I was able to do the entire workout I had planned on (including a 5 mile run) without being too annoyed by my attire. Turns out, as far as missing accessories and/or clothing at the gym tragedies go, this one wasn’t too bad (I think not having earbuds or my phone and having to workout without entertainment is worse. Luckily, I’ve never forgotten my shoes–I don’t think I could run in boots). 

It DOES seem appropriate that I had this incident on the day my brother sent me a link to a website about amyloid proteins, which can cause “memory and thinking” issues if they build up. Choosing a swimsuit bottom as a workout top does seem like a thinking issue. My brother had told me about amyloids this weekend during my Thanksgiving visit, and I think he brought it up because “amyloids” is a funny name when you (or your sister) is named Amy. Until I went to the website, I thought he was saying “amylynn” and that this was a medication to alleviate thinking problems–perhaps even more evidence that “amyloid” not only has “amy” in the name but may also be named after me. (I also think it’s cool that “amygdala” has “amy” in it and I can mispronounce it to highlight the “amy”–I can make it fit to The Beatles “Lady Madonna”).

Now that I’ve almost finished writing this, I see this incident was not so much a lesson in problem solving (if that was the case I would have MacGyvered a sports bra from gym towels) as much as in acceptance, changing perspective, and asking “why not give it a try”? It turns out that I COULD exercise in clothing not designated as such, and that, while not an ideal experience, the world didn’t fall apart because I wasn’t wearing officially sanctioned exercise wear to exercise. I wasn’t even mocked by my fellow gym goers (although they may have been too busy wondering if I was going to snap and murder someone for running into me while exiting the track). 

I’m so, so sick of riding our exercise bike, but at least the next time I do so I can appreciate that I don’t have to worry about packing appropriate clothes. And. if I am unable to locate workout clothes for some reason, at least the cats won’t care if I exercise naked.