Quality: very variable
I've been a member of seven different gyms in my life, as a result of moving around the place. Some random high- (or low-)lights that come to mind:

1. Fitness First in Purley, which halfway through my membership got taken over by a cheeky young cnut straight out of business school who had no interest in fitness. His first brilliant idea for attracting new members was to stand in the lobby and hassle existing members to extol the virtues of his emporium to their friends, in exchange for free pizza. Because people who sweat their guts out in an attempt to keep trim are obviously slavering over the thought of free pizza. He then hung a series of giant cardboard signs throughout the gym, at exactly head hight (for anyone over 6' tall, such as me). I had a gentle go at him, saying that someone could get hurt, and was gently and indifferently fobbed off. On my very next visit to the gym a sign fell on some guy's head, pointy corner first. I took great pleasure in witnessing the bollocking from the comfort of the juice bar. N.B. this was also the gym in which, returning from a slightly overlong hiatus, I forgot the respective weights of the differently-coloured discs, and loaded up a bar with much less weight than I thought I had. I thus heaved like a bastard to get it off the floor and smacked myself in the chest with the bar, sending myself flying onto my arse and almost landing in the dumbbell rack just behind me.

2. Muscleworks, Bethnal Green. The best gym in the world, in my opinion. Ronnie Coleman even worked out there, for fuck's sake. Regulars include The Whippet, who's about 6'7" and thin as a rake, and whose entire workout consists of suspending a full-body punchbag and kicking the shite out of it for 45 minutes; The Ambigously Gay Russians, who always spot each other *very* closely and who appear to work out in their underpants; and The Hippo, apparently a British powerlifting champion who easily weighs 150 kg and whose neck is wider than his head. I saw him walk up and down the rack of dumbbells one evening, warming up. His warm-up consisted of: pick up a big feck-off dumbbell; curl it about five times; collapse with exhaustion into a chair; breathing like a two-stroke motor; repeat. Easily the strongest bastard in the gym though.

3. Optiforme, Marcq-en-Barœul, Northern France. Run by a guy who placed second in a French national bodybuilding contest, and it shows. I'm sure Jean-Claude van Damme would look small next to this guy. This was the gym in which I was just finishing my workout when an incredibly hot girl walked in and started working out in the weights room (which normally is 99% male, as for most gyms). She was giving me the eye a bit so I did my damndest to impress her, but by that stage every muscle in my body was already knackered so all I could manage to do was flounder like a nine-stone weakling.

No-one's ever offered to sell me steroids, though. Maybe I don't look the type.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Thu 9 Jul 2009, 17:10, Reply)