I'm at the gym jogging on a Life Fitness Treadmill and watching the Flying Kaminsky perform--there's no other way to describe it--his exercise routine. He's a short wiry guy who looks like he's in his late twenties, though he has a bald spot near the crown of his head. He has long orangutan arms that seem to go all the way down to his shins, and a pair of windshield-sized glasses with lenses that look bullet-proof. He's wearing a pair of Adidas track pants with two white stripes down each leg, a baggy navy blue T-shirt, and a pair of dark gray Adidas running shoes--your typical workout uniform.
I call him the Flying Kaminsky because he does his exercises as though he were performing acrobatics before an audience of hundreds at Circus Circus in Las Vegas. In the middle of otherwise standard moves, he does headstands, backflips, and spins. He has this whole elaborate repertoire of flamboyant gesticulations that are all ancillary to his actual workout.
For example, in between reps on the lat pulldown machine, the Flying Kaminsky stands up, grabs the chin bar with both hands, and--without lifting any actual weight--twists his torso from side to side while simultaneously lunging forward and back and moving his arms as if he were freestyle swimming. He does this with increasing velocity, until you start to fear he will lunge out of control and the chin bar will slip from his hands, unhook from the machine, soar across the gym, and collide with the pale, thin redhead doing pull-ups.
Whenever the Flying Kaminsky finishes a set on the leg press, he doesn't just slide into a sitting position, stand up, and move on to another exercise. Instead he lies there, stretches out his spindly orangutan arms to grab the back of the press on which his feet are resting, and lifts his entire body up, up, up--then jumps, suddenly vertical in mid-air, before landing on his feet beside the machine with a thud! that makes everyone look in his direction.
Anyway, I'm jogging, listening to Nelly Furtado warble about her promiscuity, and watching the Flying Kaminsky pirouette from the bicep curl to the hip abductor, and it occurs to me that, for all his elaborate working out, he's no superman. He's just a thin balding guy in glasses who will, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, go into a headstand in the middle of a dozen bored young people doing bicycle curls.
Yet the Flying Kaminsky's place near the top of my gym's status pyramid is assured. He moves through the crowd unobstructed. He walks around like he owns the place. He has his choice of weight machines. When he does his squats and stretches, everyone makes way. Sure, maybe some do it out of concern for their personal safety, but they do it nonetheless. No one tells him to calm down and go through his routine like a typical somnambulist yuppie. Why would they? He's the Flying Kaminsky.
It's a reminder that gym-going in Washington is a strange business. In New York and Los Angeles, gyms are filled with beautiful people with unblemished skin and negative-20 percent body fat who bench-press hundreds of pounds while silently arranging themselves in perfect One-Legged-King-Pigeon yoga poses. In the temple of fitness, these are the high priests and priestesses. A novice, a typical pasty-faced schlub, as he goes about exercising quickly and unobtrusively, will avoid eye contact with the beautiful people, leaving the beauties undistracted. In the gyms in those cities it is clear who reigns supreme.
In Washington, however, nearly everyone is a pasty-faced schlub, so the normal gym hierarchy doesn't arise. A kind of anarchy prevails. The novices have overrun the temple. You can be as chubby as a Peter Paul Rubens subject or as flabby as a mobster on The Sopranos and still work out without shame. There's no one to make you feel awkward or out of place.
Instead of fitness high priests and priestesses, Washington has community-center charismatics. These are amateurs who lack the bodies of Men's Health and Self models but make up for it with zeal. In my gym alone there's the Elliptical Dervish, who is working the pedals and levers on his Life Fitness Elliptical Trainer so furiously he might as well be in religious ecstasy. There's the Treadmill Bobblehead, whose noggin is bouncing back and forth and side to side to the music on her iPod so relentlessly I feel a sudden need for a Tylenol.
And then there's the Flying Kaminsky, hanging upside-down from the abdominal board like a balding bat, performing inverted crunches-- up and down, up and down--another acolyte in thrall to the god of health.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI