Settling In, part 2

Meanwhile, I went ahead and visited some gyms in the city. Lorraine, my 12-step friend, turned out to be a part-time aerobics instructor, and she had some advice for me. “I think the Holiday Gym chain is the best,” she said. “They have several locations in town. The really good one is at the Holiday Inn.” That was the gym Mike had used before the kids and I had moved to Spain.

I decided to visit all three branches of the gym. The one at the Holiday Inn was indeed large and glittery, with a generous schedule of classes, but it was in Mike’s old Madrid neighborhood—not too convenient for me to get to. There was a smaller branch near the American Women’s Club, also flashy, and also not too good geographically. But the branch at the HUSA Princesa Hotel turned out to be just right for me—easy to reach by bus or car, with a good selection of classes. The décor was jarring—lots of mirrors, carpeting in hot pink and yellow and turquoise, with a big window looking onto an underground parking garage—but the price was right. I could get a membership for about $400 a year, which would entitle me to unlimited classes. I decided to sign up.

The first classes I tried were at the time I was used to—9 and 10 a.m. But I could see right away that these were old-lady classes, not challenging at all, so I started moving my gym time to later in the day.

When I got to the 2:30 p.m. class, I knew I had found it. This was a lunchtime class attended mostly by young working people. There was a different instructor for each day of the week, and they gave very different kinds of classes—but all of them made us work like crazy. Most of the instructors were men, who, in my experience, gave much more demanding classes than women—just what I wanted. There was Mauricio on Monday, who was like an army drill sergeant. Tuesday was the outrageous Marcos, a Brazilian who spent most of his time playing air guitar while we danced the steps he gave us. Wednesday we had Fernando, a fiendish bleached blond who never failed to leave me heaving for breath after flying over and around my step. Thursday’s class never got adequately staffed—we had one girl after another, none of whom could hold a candle to our male instructors. And Friday there was the flaky Nacho, who devised demanding, intricate dance routines but tended to forget the sequence before he was halfway through.