Working out in New York City doesn’t get any trendier than it does at that city’s Crunch, the obsessive compulsive’s first choice in fitness centers, and one that is by necessity open 24 hours a day. Now a clever editor at the New York Times has hired the obsessively trendy Guy Trebay to spend 24 hours at Crunch, and write it all down. Trebay does that and more, so that we get not only the inside dope about Matt Damon’s futile efforts to look like someone other than Matt Damon, but the big picture dope about the role that health clubs play in the life of, well, us. Trebay confesses to “a
decades-long curiosity about a locale social scientists refer to as
“the third place,” a fixed place in a psychic triangle whose other
points are work and home.” He points out that gyms figure in the lives of at least the 41.3
million Americans, to whom they are “places of refuge, escape, self-improvement or abasement and,
for those who never get past the sign-in phase, rebuke.”
Geezer says just read it. It’s good.
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