Ronald the Fitness Pterodactyl

            It’s been a while since I’ve run into anyone strange enough that I needed to share the experience with the world. Gumbyman really set the bar pretty high. Last week, however, there was a chicken at the gym that I just can’t get out of my head. I’m going to go ahead and call this guy Ronald, because he had on bright, yellow shorts, the same color of Ronald McDonald’s clothing. He was also wearing fire engine red shoes, like Ronald’s hair.

            Even if you don’t work out, I’m sure you’re familiar with the type of person who needs to outdo everyone in his actions. It’s “The Smartest Person In the Room” in social practice. If you play an instrument and you’re playing something loud, he’s the wiener in the next room who has to play louder. If you’re putting up Christmas lights and keeping things tasteful, it’s the guy who steals your electricity to have his house visible from outer space. If you’re driving home from work, it’s the piece of garbage in the Eclipse who thinks he drives a race car, passes you on the right, cuts you off, zooms ahead of you so that he can beat you to the standstill traffic up ahead, and then revs his engine, even though he’s driving a car with an automatic transmission. Ronald is this guy – at the gym. There are a lot of Ronalds at the gym, and he’s someone most people come to expect – around the free weights and the muscles….

            On Wednesday mornings I go to a class some of you gym-goers may be familiar with. It’s called BODYPUMP™. It’s a choreographed weightlifting class. Some people are able to motivate themselves to exercise. They have that drive to just work out on their own. When I’m really angry, I can generally harness that emotion into some sort of serious work. It is not often that I am really angry on Wednesday mornings after I’ve had a cup of coffee, a chocolate chip muffin, and 9 hours of sleep. I find that having a super-fit badass yell at me and tell me to keep picking things up is much more effective at getting me to do shit. I’m clearly not alone because I see the same people in this class every Wednesday morning. I think I’m pretty strong – there are some tiny ladies in there who are even stronger than I am. Ronald was new last week.

            When I saw him standing in the back I felt sorry for him. I thought, “Wow, that poor little guy is going to feel completely emasculated by this room full of women lifting heavy shit for an hour.” It’s not an arrogant statement – it’s just that people underestimate the difficulty of the class and the strength it takes to repeat an action like a bench press continuously for 5 minutes without any breaks. Little did I know, Ronald was incapable of feeling little, despite his small stature.

            The form for doing these exercises is pretty simple. And there’s an instructor in the front telling you and showing you what to do. I would say it’s virtually idiot proof. It’s not like CrossFit where all kinds of crazy things are happening – I think if my clumsy butt tried that I’d become fast friends with my local ER doctors. Ronald was defiant. Ronald KNEW BETTER. Despite the fact that our instructor has taught thousands of these classes, Ronald was going to do his own version of these exercises.

            Thank the lord for mirrors in group-exercise rooms. And thank goodness, I know how to laugh silently. When Ronald squatted he looked like he was about to vomit into an imaginary toilet in front of him, rather than keeping his chest up and sitting into an imaginary chair. We do an exercise called a dead lift, which our fearless leader compares to “stripper pose.” Ronald would suck as a stripper. The concept of shaving the bar down as close to the body as possible was lost on him. He was dropping that bar through the porcelain goddess he visited in his squats. Bicep curls? He looked like he was trying to throw things behind his head – literally, as if you would through salt over your shoulder. My favorite though, was when he decided to do his pterodactyl impression. He was specifically told to keep his elbows and hands below his shoulders when raising the weights up in shoulder flies. I actually saw him shake his head “no,” which was followed by him throwing his arms WAY up in the air like he was trying to lift off out of the room. OH, and the best part of that was that he was doing it with 1 kg weights – the smallest ones available.

            I felt really bad for the woman who brought Ronald to the class. I felt bad that she knew this guy and had to talk to him. I’m sure he’s a real peach of a person. Who was he trying to impress? He was in a room full of women who were all secretly laughing at him and thinking he was a giant turd. I suppose it takes all kinds to make the world, but I wouldn’t mind running into less of his kind.

"Look at ME, I'm the SMARTEST PERSON in THE ROOM!"

He actually IS the smartest person
in the room. TSPIRs may think
they are Stephen Hawking smart...No.

           We all know the type. You try and have a conversation with this person – a reasonable interchange of discourse. Or maybe you didn’t try to have a conversation with this person. Maybe you made a statement, something that didn’t require a response. Perhaps you made a comment about how it would be nice to take a moment and remember the victims of the Holocaust. And then the person goes off on you about how Germany is strangling the Greek economy, leaving you absolutely baffled because there is no correlation between the two things. Or you walk outside with this person and look at the blue sky and say, “Wow, it’s a beautiful sunny day.” The person says “No. You’re wrong. It’s raining.” You have found yourself with “the smartest person in the room.”

            I think I’m going to shorten this to TSPIR because it’s faster to type and it feels like something you would say when you wanted to spit, and that’s what I find myself wanting to do when I’m around the smartest person in the room. (Please note, most often TSPIR is not ACTUALLY the most intelligent person around. It’s a self-awarded title). These are DANGEROUS times for those of us who have to deal with TSPIRs. It used to be that if you wanted to know something, you had to go to a library. There was this magical collection of books called The Encyclopedia. Everything in the encyclopedia was researched and vetted and known to be fact, or fact as far as current science had proved. And there were other books in the library called “nonfiction.” These books were written using something called “research.” The research was done by a human who went out and found factual information either in books containing other vetted factual information or by going to primary sources and recording the facts themselves.

            Nowadays, there’s this wealth of dangerous text out there for TSPIRs to draw on called the Internet. You can find any information you want on the Internet. And the best part about it is that none of it has to be true. People think everything they read on Wikipedia is true. It’s not. That’s why it’s FREE. “Wikipedia the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Ugh. It’s like TSPIR heaven. They say a little bit of knowledge can be very dangerous. Well, the world has become an intellectual war zone. And the TSPIRs are like unmarked landmines.

            Have you noticed that you can’t say anything anymore without someone telling you that they know more about it than you do? EVERYONE’S an expert these days. It makes for pretty hilarious eavesdropping, to be honest. Do you think you know some TSPIRs, but you’re not sure? I can help you identify these people. They generally have to have the last word in a conversation. It’s to a degree that is noticeably odd – as in, the conversation’s over and they’ve decided to keep talking. They might come and find you to let you know that something you told them last week, only because you thought they might find it interesting, was erroneous. They are also the type that in the absence of an actual ROOM will use places like FACEBOOK to take over as their vehicle for existence. There are walls in a room, so your Facebook wall is as good a place as any for them to prove their superiority by showing off their knowledge, no matter how misguided or just plain wrong it might be.

            It wouldn’t be fair if I pointed these people out and didn’t offer an escape plan. They don’t respond to reason. And arguing only eggs them on, so responding in a logical manner or trying to continue conversation is the worst possible course of action. Whatever you do, DON’T STAY ON TOPIC. Throw them off. Pick something nonsensical and start yelling it in their face. “Chicken shit and baked beans! Chicken shit and baked beans!” They won’t know what to do with something like this. It’s not a statement they can argue with. It’s not a fact they can try to disprove. It’s nonsensical crap. It also serves to warn anyone else nearby that there’s something not right going down and they should just steer clear. There is a better course of action, however, and it is my preferred method. Since I don’t have any need to feel like the smartest person in the room myself, I’m happy to just leave the room and let these jerks have the room to themselves. They can keep arguing alone. They can say whatever they want. Who gives a rat’s ass? Let the forest fall on them and they can find out if it makes any noise when it knocks them unconscious. When they wake up I’ll be long gone and way less irritated.