gym rat

Do I look like June Cleaver?

That Asian-Looking Chick Leave a comment

It’s been a week since I complained about my rat’s nest hair and how it was dropping loose hairs into my face and interfering with my gym experience.

“Nothing works,” I said in that post. “If there’s a solution short of shaving my head, I want to know.”

One friend from BodyPump joked, “A shower cap!”

Another friend supplied a pic of a lady wearing a shower cap, all smiling and done up with makeup and looking like she also had a vacuum cleaner and high heels.

The next time I went to BodyPump, I gathered my weights and came back to my spot to find a shower cap lying on my bench. It didn’t take a PhD in psychology to figure out who put it there.

It wasn’t the friend who first commented, because she lives in another state. It was the guy who posted the shower cap lady. Cue jokes about me wearing the shower cap in class, which will never happen. He declared it himself: “Kristi will wear a shower cap the day I quit complaining about lunges.”

Not a snowball’s chance in hell.

I did a dress rehearsal, anyway, to verify that the shower cap wouldn’t work. And it didn’t. The elastic band wasn’t that elasticky, and my hair is very resistant to staying where I put it.

Do I look like June Cleaver?

 

THIS ISN’T WORKING

 

I’m pretty sure that’s also my expression when loose hairs fall in my face at the gym. It’s not “I wish I was holding a feather duster instead of a dumbbell.”

(In case you’re wondering, the outside of my right eye is red because I managed to tear my conjunctiva while doing absolutely nothing. It’s fine. My eye doctor prescribed antibiotic eye-drops, cold compresses, and ibuprofen. It will heal itself.)

Remember when I needed a shower cap for real, but couldn’t see shopping for one? Two people gifted me with shower caps after that, three years apart from each other. The first was my sista-from-another-mother, and the second was my sister-in-law. I thought that was a weird coincidence. That’s what sisters do, apparently.

But I digress. The jokester responsible for this post – let’s just call him “Ron” – has been walking a thin line with me at the gym with his antics; this shower cap was his crowning achievement, to date. I should start a petition to double our lunge tracks.

About the rat’s nest on my head. (My gym pet peeve.)

That Asian-Looking Chick Leave a comment

Most gym pet peeves have to do with people being rude: hogging the equipment, leaving sweat on the equipment, resting on the equipment between sets, leaving weights lying around instead of re-racking them, talking on the phone or texting while chilling on the equipment, etc.

None of this is cool in my book, either, but I only have one major gym pet peeve, and that is my own hair. My scalp releases loose hairs that sabotage my workout. Who else has this issue? If there’s a solution short of shaving my head, I want to know.

My hair gets on my nerves more than anything else at the gym. It literally gets on my nerves. I try not to let it, but it’s easier said than done. When a hair falls out and lands on me, it hijacks my sensory nervous system so the strand of hair is all I can feel. It’s hard to ignore.

The problem is that my hair is a rat’s nest, more at the gym than anywhere else. Here’s my hair after my workout yesterday morning:

 

Post-workout, 8/10/2017

 

If my hair only looked like a rat’s nest, I wouldn’t care, because I don’t care what I look like when I go to the gym in the morning. I put on sunscreen, lip-gloss, and clean clothing, and I’m good.

The problem is that my hair behaves like a rat’s nest. It doesn’t stay together. It gets pulled apart simply by existing. At some point during the workout, people will see me doing stuff with one hand while I’m frantically clawing at my face with the other hand. Usually, the hair lands in my mouth or in one of my eyes. I sometimes find the hair plastered across my sweaty cheek.

This happens every time I work out. Without fail. No matter what I do. I will spend long minutes beforehand sliding my fingers through my hair and removing loose strands. I’ll do up my ponytail and repeat the process, also removing loose hairs from my bangs and the sides that don’t get pulled up.

Nothing works. Headbands? I wish. I’ve tried. They don’t stay on, and then I have two problems.

I know this is petty and ridiculous. I AM grateful to have any hair at all, but having hair doesn’t make me immune to annoyance when the hairs try to blind or choke me!

So my hair is a rat’s nest at the gym. It gives the term “gym rat” a whole new meaning. Fine. I just need for the nest to hold together until I’m done with my workout.

[/shallow rant of the day]