"We Have a Pool and a Pond..."

For years, I avoided the gym. Not out of laziness, mind you, as I'm quite a portrait of top physical conditioning. Rather, it's the desire to exercise without some steroid case sweating his balls off on a machine I'm waiting to use, or falling off a treadmill when some chick in spandex decides to do squats right in front of me (and what is up with that, by the way? Intentional, right?).

But on business trips, the hotel gym provided a majestic sanctuary -- clean, sparsely populated, and refreshingly troglodyte-free. At least until a recent trip to New Orleans, where I found, on my first and last trip to the hotel gym, a chick working out in cut-off jeans shorts and a guy with a 36-inch neck and a shirt that read -- I'm not making this up -- "Can I borrow your girlfriend?"

The only saving grace was that I saw the women I'm someday going to marry. Six foot two, about 200 pounds of rock-hard muscle, tattoos up and down each arm, and gluteal muscles that I could envision latching onto my nose and pulling every shred of skin off my face like a rubber mask. I've never dated a woman with bigger arms than my own, but after drinking in the glory that was this behemoth, I haven't been able to erase the idea from my mind.

Nonetheless, this week I'll be shopping for a home gym.