Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Saving money on the gym

This is one that DW gets all the credit for. The answer is: join the Y.

DW is a big gym rat - she's up at 5AM every day to go do her workout thing. When she was pregnant she worked out up until the day before the kids were born, and got back to it as soon as the docs allowed her to. It's really an important part - maybe the only part - of her "self care" regimen. And I have to admit, admiringly, that all that hard work pays off, if you know what I mean. Woof!

Anyway, when we moved to Illinois and I finally had a salary after 5 years in school I gave her the option to join any gym she wanted. You know nowadays they have gyms with all sorts of fancy amenities and what have you, massage-istes and the like, and she did join one for a while, but then being the frugal sort and not really having that much interest in the amenities she ended up quitting the fancy gym and joining the Y.

The Y costs all of about $60 a month, you can take all sorts of classes (the kids all take classes there: karate, gymstastics, and dance), it's got plenty of machines so no waiting, and it's clean. You could spend three times as much somewhere else for the same basic thing. Also there's reciprocity, and there's Ys everywhere, so you always have access to the gym wherever you are without having to have guest passes or anything.

And before you ask: not joining any gym isn't really an option, because they have weights and other machines there that we could never have at home, and also because even Kansas has seasons so you need to be prepared for inclemency.

So there you go. It's good for you too. The only drawback is that I have to explain to my son what the "C" stands for, and why it's okay for us to go there anyway.

4 comments:

Mary said...

Wow.. must be hard for you to explain that. C being so awful and all.

Mary said...

I apologize, I took that way wrong.

rebmoti said...

It's okay, I can be "C" about this.

The explanation, by the way, has to do with shared values, which is hard to explain to a 5 year old but we have to start somewhere. There isn't anything the Y considers "C" values that aren't also "J" values.

Mary said...

I know. The problem was when I read it--for some reason I had in my head that you had warned the Y against Cs. I rethought and realized--oh gosh--the kid just wanted to know probably why a J would go to a C gym.My kids would have matter of factly asked the same sort of thing I'm sure. Duh. So dumb.

I need to not be so defensive--but I've gotten alot of another sort of c for being a C,and a conservative one especially these days- we're fair game, so no wonder I'd jump to the wrong conclusion.
Sorry again.