On Friday March 29th 2019, at 8 PM, a 24 Hour Fitness in downtown Berkeley, California, will shut down for good. The owner of the building where that branch of 24 Hour Fitness resides is not renewing their lease, apparently.

I am a 24 Hour Fitness member, and my membership was at that club. I started off many years ago with a one club membership, but then upgraded it to a general membership a few years later. (I’m not allowed in their extra special Sports Clubs, as I have been occasionally told by grumpy employees when I tried to transgress that sacred ground.) Once in a blue moon I would go to another 24HF, maybe in Oakland or Richmond, but I almost always went to that one little gym on Addison Street.

I was a member of that club for 17 years.

I will still be a member. They’re transferring my membership to a 24 Hour Fitness just a bit North of Berkeley, about a ten to fifteen minute drive away. Still, I’d rather just stick around Berkeley. I may even cancel my membership.

24 Hour Fitness really is the McDonald’s of gyms. And that gym wasn’t particularly special. In fact, it was oftentimes a pretty crappy gym. The men’s locker room was a super thin hallway where people would have to squeeze by you while you were changing clothes. Too much equipment was in sorry shape: Broken exercycles, weight machines with missing grips or pads, equipment that broke down a lot, occasional drips from the ceiling, and way too often there were burned out lights. Sometimes “new” machines or equipment would show up, but most of them were obviously hand-me-downs from other gyms.

I just spent my last workout session there, on this Wednesday, March 27th. I was feeling a little nostalgic about the place, and was surprised by how much I was going to miss it.

In 1995 I got away from my drug and alcohol habit by joining Narcotics Anonymous, and in the late 90’s I went back to school. Going to back to school was part of my newfound recovery and my new outlook on life. I went from a junior college to Cal State Hayward, (since renamed with the incredibly wishy-washy moniker Cal State East Bay,) where I studied computer science. While I was braving the jungles of calculus and compiler design courses, I took a gym class. This class had an excellent general physical fitness coach, who was also the soccer team coach. It inspired me to look for a place to work out outside of my college.

There were some gyms in my area that were apparently exclusive and expensive, (That is, intimidating,) and then there was the local YMCA. I had a crazy schedule with work and school, and I realized that I wouldn’t be able to make it to the YMCA in time on most days because of their limited hours. Plus the YMCA was a bit pricey for my modest student budget.

Not only was the local 24 Hour Fitness way cheaper than the YMCA, I could go there any time. I wouldn’t have to worry about rushing back from school or work in order to get to the gym on time. I could stumble in at any time of day or night and take my time.

I started my membership there around 2002.

For the first time in my life I forced myself to do a regular workout regimen. At least five times a week I would go to that gym, even if I was dead tired or uninspired or just feeling blah. I even went if I knew I was only going to stick around for half an hour to do an uninspired workout. I wanted to make it a habit. I was determined to get into shape.

Then, as I was exploring my new life as a fitness nerd, I saw a flyer for a Narcotics Anonymous 5K at a meeting. It was the first footrace I ever entered. It wasn’t much of a race. It was just a bunch of recovering drug addicts getting together to run down a few dirt paths at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. But it was still fun, and it gave me new ideas.

I then signed up for San Francisco’s famous Bay to Breakers, my first official footrace. It was quite a challenge, but also a lot of fun. That’s when I decided I was going to train for a marathon. I wanted to do 26.2 as a bucket list item.

Because of my gym class, I knew I had to do leg exercises in order to run well and avoid injuries. I dedicated myself to a running schedule in addition to my regular visits to the gym. In the summer of 2009, in my forties, I ran my first ever marathon in San Francisco. It was grueling and torturous, and I walked around like Frankenstein for a week afterwards, but I was hooked. Since then I’ve run thirty four more marathons, and plan to run more this year.

With my new running life I didn’t go to 24 Hour Fitness as much, since most of my workouts were just running all over the place. But I still kept my gym membership. I needed a place for alternate cardio and weight machines.

Then, in 2012, a fellow recovering addict and old friend who had become a physical fitness trainer asked people on Facebook if they wanted to try out her fitness bootcamp at her gym. I thought “That’ll be easy. I’m a marathoner! I work out all the time!” Turns out I wasn’t in as good a shape as I thought. The next day after my first ever bootcamp it took me a long time to sit up and walk around and do other things, such as lift up my arms.

Ever since then I try to go to a bootcamp at least once a week. My friend’s place is gone now, and I’ve found a new place with an excellent trainer, but even with the bootcamps and the running schedules I still kept my 24 Fitness membership. I would go there after work, before school, whenever I had an injury that kept me from running and I needed those cycles or elliptical machines. Sometimes I would go there when I was simply stressed out and needed to blow off some steam, and there were times I went there when I just simply had another cursed bout of insomnia and needed something to do in my waking hours.

The place was quite popular with the local UC Berkeley students. Many was the time that I would see someone on an exercycle or elliptical, working out while simultaneously reading a textbook the size of a cinder block. I also started to recognize the regulars and I mentally assigned them nicknames. There was Elliptical Girl, the young woman who would be on the elliptical machine when I showed up, and would still be on it by the time I left. Rasta Runner, a young man in excellent shape who was oftentimes on the treadmill, and who had to bunch up his very long dreadlocks on top of his head like some sort of ceremonial headdress. Then there was Dog Walker, a blind man who would show up with different seeing eye dogs. (I believed he helped train them.) I once helped him adjust an exercycle, and my reward for my good deed was being allowed to pet his guide dog.

Nothing really major ever happened at that club. It was usually quite humdrum. Only rarely were there memorable moments. Once the cardio room was filled with a dance troupe in the evening, taking up the entire room to dance to Punjabi music. I was astonished when I saw them later on, dancing on a major network talent show. Then there was one late night when I was pedaling away on a cycle, when the gym was virtually deserted, and a young woman approached me and asked me for help. She told me a strange man was following her around the gym, that he would wander nearby and always get on any machine that was next to hers when she started working out and she was quite concerned about the man’s intentions. She was describing the man to me just as he walked into the cardio room. When he saw her talking to me, he quickly left the gym. I ended up walking her back to her car in case he popped up again.

But most of my memories are in the place itself. Believe it or not, much of the equipment that was there when I joined in the early aughts was still there when I attended this evening on my last visit. Many of the gym’s machines were ones that I have been using for more than a decade and a half.

My last official exercise at this 24 Hour Fitness was ten reps on the pull up machine. I can’t remember if that machine was there when I first got there, but it has been there for quite some time.

This crappy McGym had seen me through more than a dozen Ragnar Relays, my bootcamp transformation, more than thirty Marathons, and scores of other races. My exercise regimen is a big part of my substance abuse recovery. I sometimes wonder where I would be without it. Sometimes I believe my nearly two decades of fitness pursuits may have even saved my life, if not just simply preserved my sanity. (Or what was left of it when I finally cleaned up.)

I am the kind of guy who does burpees without being hollered at by a trainer, the kind of guy who owns his own kettlebells, as well as someone who runs long distances for fun, distances that the vast majority of people are too lazy to drive, much less traverse acoustically. I am a fitness nerd. Maybe not as much as some of my other friends, but I got started on that life changing journey at that crappy gym which was with me all along the way during my remarkable and life changing transformation.

And now that place will be no more.

My gym for the last seventeen years
on Addison Street
in Berkeley.