Also, the loud music blaring overhead is (a) clearly meant to appease finance bros and (b) conducive to raising one’s heart rate, not concentration. Even on 90-degree days, I look like February in Wisconsin. The temperature is kept at a frigid 68 degrees, which requires having a wool sweater stashed in my gym bag at all times. It’s not a perfect arrangement, though, because this place is, first and foremost, a gym. I even use exercise as a procrastination tool, which is some sort of Jedi mind trick. But Equinox’s membership fee is considerably less than the most economical option at my local WeWork, which runs around $300 for a “hot desk.” And at Equinox, I find myself thinking bizarre things, like, “Well, I guess I’m here already,” before clambering atop an elliptical machine for half an hour. I played on my middle-school basketball team for an entire season without ever learning the rules, profoundly dislike being sweaty, and was once told by a soccer coach to “kick the ball off the field” in the unlikely event one ever came near me.
Nor am I a “natural athlete” - the last time I voluntarily ran more than a mile was … never. I’m really not the type of person to plunk down $185 a month for a gym. No dagger stares from disgruntled baristas. There’d be no jockeying for outlet space, I realized. The adjoining cafe, with its high ceilings and plenty of comfy couches, was empty the day I visited. After a brief period of shopping around - not all locations are properly outfitted - I settled on a gym ensconced in a wood-paneled former bank building on Wall Street, kitty-corner to the New York Stock Exchange. Of the gyms mentioned in the article, Equinox was the only one I could find in New York City. Too bad I couldn’t find a single person who’d actually tried working out of one. Big-box gyms were beginning to court the freelance economy, the article teased. An internet search led me to a Wall Street Journal piece from last year, which detailed how several chains had outfitted their locations with outlets, good Wi-Fi, and comfortable seating. Turns out, I’m not the first person to ask the question. I wondered, “What if those two things could be combined?” But on a meager freelancer’s income, the prospect of doling out so much cash made me gag. I thought: Maybe I should get a co-working space? A gym membership? Probably both. For the sake of productivity, I glued myself to my laptop - and, inadvertently, to my couch. Here’s how this happened: Earlier this year, I kick-started a freelance career after years of on-staff drudgery. Sometimes I sing in the shower, because who will hear me? The experience is - and I can’t even believe I’m saying this - pleasant.īut let’s back up. An empty women’s locker room at the Wall Street Equinox is, I’ve learned, one of the most luxurious things in existence, with unfettered access to silky Kiehl’s face cream and silence, beautiful silence.
That’s the window when competition for machines is nonexistent and, most critically, the locker room is completely empty.
I take a break to exercise sometime between 3 and 4:30 p.m., well after the lunch rush and before people start trickling out of work. I camp out next to a large window at the far end of the marble table, and then I write. The irony that I, a journalist who writes mostly about food, have elected to spend every weekday waking hour in a gym has not escaped me. I am not employed by Equinox, but I do work here - specifically, at the long marble table studded with outlets in the adjoining Greenpower Cafe, which serves virtuous things like green smoothies and kale salads. He seems unperturbed by the pumping house music that - I’ve learned over the past two months - blares at all hours inside this gym at the tourist-clogged corner of Nassau and Wall Street in lower Manhattan.
There’s a man asleep in the velvet armchair in the corner of my office.
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