"Hello, Randy!" the big girl waved at me happily when I entered our gym. It was the one Mark has introduced to us a week or so ago. I noticed Nathan being friendly with her but I wasn't that impressed. She was mostly slacking around instead of doing any real work and I was slowly moving to a Mark's point of view that she wasn't taking it seriously at all.
"Hello, Cathy," I nodded at her politely. "I hope you will do some good work today," there was no point to antagonizing her, but I still wanted her to know that I noticed her laziness.
"Of course I will!" she was suddenly way too enthusiastic. "Would you mind giving me pointers if I do something wrong though? Nathan had to leave early today," she tilted her head.
"Yeah, why not, but I need to do my workout first, so stick to what you know for now and we can do the more complicated stuff later."
"Sure, sure, thank you," she made a mock bow towards me and I rolled my eyes.
There was almost no one in the gym at this hour and even those few that were working hard slowly trickled out as we neared the closing time. I kept pumping iron partially hoping that the girl would get tired and just leave, but it looked like she was determined to wait me out and hold me to my promise, which was really unfortunate. Outwardly I was ignoring her most of the time, but I kept checking her form from time to time just to get ready for the inevitable teaching session. And mostly it looked even sloppier than I expected it to be. She was using minimal weight so the exercises weren't even challenging and pauses between them were way too long since she kept going back to her phone and adjusting the playlist. She was already wired in to the system of our gym and just played her songs as she pleased. Not that her music was any kind of bad, I was just surprised how fast she made herself at home here while still failing to take the workouts seriously.
Most of our regulars chose this place because they wanted to put in the work without any fuss from the big commercial gyms and to be honest, it was way cheaper than the membership there. But we just wanted okay space with good equipment, so we could work out in peace and go on with our lives after. Few looks her way reassured me that she was in for something completely different. She would be probably at home at some of those big places with their smoothies, saunas and massage tables. When she actually tried to do a serious exercise, her form was bad and once or twice I winced as she almost hurt herself. Still, she persevered long enough that I could not ignore her any longer without looking rude. I did not want to piss off Mark's coworker and I still wanted to keep a decent reputation of our gym.
"Okay, I am almost done with my basic stuff, you have still some energy left in there?" I pointed at her body knowing full well she packed a lot of extra calories.
"Sure, Randy, but you were working pretty hard yourself. Aren't you already burnt out?" she raised her eyebrow.
"This is nothing, you should see some of the work Tom does when he gets in the mood. Don't worry about me, you wanted me to check some exercises for you? What do you have in mind?"
"Well, to be honest, I don't really remember how any of them are called, it will be probably easier if I show them to you and you will correct me if I do something wrong?" she shrugged and looked questioningly at me.
"Okay, let's do it your way," I smiled forcefully and kept myself from rolling my eyes. It really sounded like she didn't do even the bare minimum to start. If she did not remember the proper form, used as little weight as possible and couldn't even keep track of the names, what were we even doing here?
I kept my mouth shut and prodded her to start doing the exercises so we could be done with this nonsense as soon as possible. She still kept getting the smallest weights possible, but since we were going for technique now, I didn't protest. She started with upper body, going through dumbbells and machines, but after few exercises, we moved to her core and finally lower body. I had to correct her every time because her technique was borderline dangerous on these, but she was attentive, looking at me with utmost focus, so at least we were getting somewhere. She asked a follow-up question here and there so I almost started believing her intentions were genuine and she was just clumsy, which would not be that bad. Lazy I would hate, but clumsy I could at least work with.
"You are okay with helping me this much, right?" she asked me after I gave her another pointer.
"Yeah, I am," I nodded because it was a pointless question, of course I didn't mind.
"Because you didn't look too happy when we began."
"True," I shrugged. "Because I thought you are just lazy."
"But you are warming up towards me, aren't you?"
"You can say that," I smiled because there was some sympathy towards her right now.
