CommentsNFigments

I was walking up to the George Mason University Aquatic Center to go to the Patriot Team Master’s Swim Team class and there is a large glass front on one side of the building with a lot of exercise equipment, such as treadmills, fitness bikes, recumbent bikes and what have you.  Just then, a cute little coed (I still have an eye for a ‘well turned ankle’, as they used to say) ran by me, jogging merrily on her way.  In the fitness center, there were a number of men and women exercising.  While this is not a strange site in this day and age, I remember when…

Women who played sports could swim and play tennis.  Maybe field hockey was okay, but I never saw it so I really can’t say yea or nay.  Any other sports were “unladylike”.  Play basketball?  NEVER!  Go to the “gym”.  that was for guys only.  Run?!?  Nobody ran.  I was on the boxing team and I would only run if the (heavyweight and the light-heavyweight ran with me.  People would call you names from passing vehicles, and occasionally throw something at you, such as an old beer can or a coke bottle.

Then the running craze hit.  It swept the country like nothing else since.  Bill Bowerman (Nike) dropped some rubber in the waffle iron and came out with the “waffle” sole on his shoes. They were a hit.  We learned what “pronation” was and became acquainted with foot doctors.  You had to have new gear to run; sweat pants were out, they were for the gym.  Interestingly enough, it was okay to wear shorts to run in.  If you had been caught on the street wearing shorts before this, you were surrounded by a group of your “peers” and derided as a “sissy”.  Now you know why I learned to box–I loved to play tennis…and wore shorts.

Biking became popular, it was not just for “little kids” anymore; and, you had to have new gear for that,too–including new shoes, sleek new lightweight bikes with names we never heard of before, and, of course, tight fitting leotards (for want of a better word), and a helmet.  Before this, if you caught a guy in leotards, he was definitely gay or a ballet dancer and thought to be gay anyway.

Women still shunned the “gym”, and gradually, this male bastion became the “fitness center”.  The ladies liked that name and in they came.  Out went the gray sweat shirt and pants that looked bad and smelled worse (hey, nobody bothered to wash them until their buddies teared up and told them to wash them or get out).  Of course, you had to have new gear to go to the “fitness center”.  Bright colored Nike gear replaced the old sweats, and flashy Nike, et al, “cross trainers” replaced your old faithful Keds.  Gyms were noisy and smelly, with guys kidding each other about everything.  If you set a record you could let everyone in the place know about it whether they wanted to know or not.  Language could get colorful in the gym.  Fitness centers are operated with a whole lot more restraint and decorum.  No more “four letter words” if you missed on a weight you knew you could do.  In the gym, if you finished a set of curls to increase your meager biceps, you could stand in front of the mirror and flex (but not too much).  Not so in the fitness center.  Maybe a casual “sneak peek”, but that’s about it. Gyms had free weights; fitness centers had machines.  It was like night and day.

Title 10, of course, changed the whole face of exercise and sports.  “Why, yes, sweetie, you can lift weights…er…do resistance exercises”.  Women would never admit that they lifted weights.  Of course, the old misconceptions died hard.  Woman were too frail, for example, to run a marathon.  I still remember the gal who registered for the Boston Marathon and they didn’t realize she was a woman until she showed up.  The head of the marathon actually chased her down to keep her out of the race.  I don’t recall if he succeeded, but he tried like the dickens.

The same thing misconceptions occurred with tall men.  They couldn’t play basketball, because they had an “enlarged heart”, so it was not good for them to engage in such a strenuous sport.  The “tall” basketball player was no more than 6′3″ or 6′5″.  It wasn’t until a college student named Bevo Francis shattered that myth and George Mikan did it in the pros.  The race was on to find big men! (forget that enlarged heart stuff, send that tall sucker in here!). The age of the big man in basketball had arrived.

All of a sudden, there were a whole lot of people who were “certified” in this or that.  It didn’t matter if they knew anything except a bunch of “concepts”, THEY WERE CERTIFIED!  Now, three things I know about “certified” (and you can throw in “accredited”, too).  1. It begins with a “C”.  2. You don’t give it to yourself. and 3. It’s perceived as a good thing.  Outside of that, it’s a fistfight.  A whole new wold opened up.  It didn’t matter what you athletic achievemsts were, it only mattered if you were “certified”.  I have to admit that I have had more than one argument with someone who was “certified”.  Things that we had done in our training that we thought were beneficial for our sport, and ourselves therefore, were derided as being incorrect and the not-too-veiled implication that we were a couple of bricks shy of a load.  One was the notion that you never do a squat and allow your upper leg to go any lower than parallel to the floor.  It was “bad” for your knees, or whatever.  Well, I did a squat with 300 pounds all the way down where my backside touched my ankles and my knees were just fine.  But, that’s the way we used to do it before we “knew better”.  Education is a wonderful thing!  Then, so is experience.  Their experience was in the classroom and mine was in the gym with some Olympic and world-class athletes (and a lot of ordinary people) and we never had anybody’s knee bust.  So, take your pick, hard knocks or hard bound books.  But we digress.

Women also ventured into that definitive bastion of the male, the engineering school.  Women could be nurses or teachers.  Those were “woman’s domains”.  Even in the military, woman were nurses or administrative personnel.  A woman flying a plane!  ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND!?!  Yet, they do today.  Interestingly, woman pilots ferried many of the fighter planes over to the combat areas.  They received little or no recognition for their roles, but, then again, it was a (white) man’s world.  Some things have changed for the better.  I remember when our school enrolled their first woman in the architecture department.  Everyone wanted to go see her to see what she looked like.  Gee, she couldn’t be very pretty if she wanted to be an engineer, huh?  Now we have lots of them.  And some of them are pretty!

In retrospect, I have often wondered why women let themselves be bound by such societal constraints.  Why they didn’t demand more equality sooner.  Maybe someday, we’ll have a roundtable discussion on that.

In the meantime, if you have any experiences similar to those above, add your comments at ken@MortgagePayoffMasters.com.

Next time, we’ll talk about the old neighborhood.