{"id":169781,"date":"2025-01-31T10:30:26","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T15:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=169781"},"modified":"2025-02-18T17:42:24","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T22:42:24","slug":"a-journey-through-four-gyms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/01\/31\/a-journey-through-four-gyms\/","title":{"rendered":"A Journey Through Four Gyms"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Public gym in Taipei. Screenshot from Google Maps.<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s the tail end of January, the month of resolutions made and broken, gym memberships purchased and fitness classes left unattended. This week, we\u2019re publishing a series of dispatches from the gym.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Instagram Trainer<\/strong><\/p>\n

I met him online, at a vulnerable moment, during one of the worst winters of my life. It was a year into the pandemic and I had just moved to Upstate New York for graduate school, which was being held over Zoom, and I was going through a breakup. A friend of a friend had been working out with him IRL and had reposted a few of his stories. Out of curiosity, I\u2019d clicked on his profile\u2014@bootiesbyarthur. \u201cNJ\u2019s PERSONAL TRAINER, Hour glass specialist \u23f3\ud83c\udf51,\u201d his bio read. His profile was full of videos of ample-buttocked women doing jump squats and hip thrusts.<\/p>\n

\u201cTRANSFORMATION WEDNESDAYS \ud83d\udd25\ud83d\udcaa,\u201d one post read, featuring before-and-after photos of a young, ethnically ambiguous woman in a bikini.<\/p>\n

\n

Men lie, Women lie, RESULTS DON\u2019T LIE. Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending<\/p>\n

#tranformationwednesday<\/a> #fitnessmotivation<\/a> #personaltrainer<\/a> #girlsthatlift<\/a> #slimthickfit<\/a> #gymmotivation<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Arthur worked primarily out of a shared gym space in New Jersey where he trained dozens of people regularly, but he also did online and in-home coaching around the tristate area. Because I was not local, he recommended I sign up for his online program. For $200 a month, I received a weekly workout plan (\u201cDAY 1: LEGS, DAY 2: UPPER-BODY DAY, 1 DAY OFF,\u201d et cetera), diet plan, and one thirty-minute combined check-in and workout session over FaceTime per month. I could purchase additional workout sessions at a cost of thirty dollars per meeting.<\/p>\n

In Arthur\u2019s workout plan, \u201cLEG DAY\u201d meant goblet squats, reverse lunges, jump squats, leg extensions (via a leg-extension machine), and hamstring curls. \u201cUPPER-BODY DAY\u201d included dumbbell shoulder presses, dumbbell bicep curls, single-arm dumbbell low rows, planks, and leg lifts, and each exercise was customizable. I ordered a set of dumbbells, and when I told Arthur that the university gym was still shut down, he gave me substitute exercises\u2014Romanian deadlifts with dumbbells instead of the leg extensions and step-ups instead of the hamstring curls\u2014that I could do at home instead.<\/p>\n

Arthur told me to text him anytime with questions\u2014\u201cLegit 24\/7 at your service : )\u201d\u2014and to let him know each time I completed a workout. Before my first session, I sent him my \u201cbefore\u201d photos, as instructed. Using the self-timer on my phone, I photographed myself in my underwear from the back, side, and front\u2014and in response he emailed me a motivational message. \u201cFirst day today ! Video your workouts and tag meeee i wanna see how you\u2019re form and tempo \ud83d\ude42 kill it .\u201d<\/p>\n

I was a relative newbie to this kind of strength training, and although I had looked up each exercise on YouTube, the first workouts made me feel ashamed and annoyed with myself. I could barely get through the first set of goblet squats, not to mention do three more ten-rep sets, as Arthur wanted. I couldn\u2019t do even a single push-up. It\u2019s clear to me now that I had no idea what I was doing. \u201cwe have to fix your form and positioning don\u2019t worry it\u2019s better than most when they first start LOL,\u201d Arthur texted after my first workout, during which I\u2019d recorded a video of myself doing each exercise. \u201cKeep the dumbbells closer to your legs and slow the tempo down.\u201d After a few exchanges like this, though, and especially after our FaceTime meetings, I began to gain confidence and strength.<\/p>\n

Arthur was a kind and knowledgeable trainer. During our FaceTime sessions\u2014which he often held from his car, parked outside his next client\u2019s house\u2014he would correct my form and yell motivating things like, \u201cYou got it, girl!\u201d In between sets, he explained the rationale behind the exercises we were doing (\u201cThe swing motion activates the entire backside, aka the largest muscles in our bodies for maximum engagement,\u201d I remember him telling me) and gossiped about his other clients. \u201cI trained Tyga last week,\u201d he told me once. \u201cAt his New Jersey pad.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOMG, was Kylie there?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think so,\u201d he said. \u201cThere were a lot of people at the house.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cActually, I think they broke up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI see.\u201d<\/p>\n

That night, I did a Google image search for Tyga. His arms, though well defined, looked smaller than mine. I wondered how much Tyga could bench. I imagined Arthur yelling at him to do fifty sumo squats.<\/p>\n

I decided to add some additional one-on-one sessions each week. I loved the idea of Arthur yelling at me from his car. Somehow it made receiving personal training\u2014which I thought of as a bourgeois luxury\u2014feel like a good deal. Thirty dollars per session seemed extraordinarily cheap, especially for access to someone who was training a celebrity.<\/p>\n

Although we only met once per week, Arthur and I were in touch a lot. \u201cI just did the whole workout T_T except the core LOL,\u201d I texted him one afternoon. \u201cI\u2019m gonna do the core tonight. And some yoga too. I imagined ur voice in my head yelling at me. I didn\u2019t give up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLmfaooo aye,\u201d Arthur texted back. \u201cYou\u2019re gunna love the sessions when you actually meet me Lmfaoo. Or you\u2019ll hate me. Or both LOLLL.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHate and love are very connected,\u201d I replied.<\/p>\n

I had vaguely mentioned that receiving a meal plan might be \u201ctriggering\u201d for me, and so at first Arthur didn\u2019t send one. But then I decided, what the hell, why not embrace the process? The plan consisted of four meals per day, one of which was a smoothie. The directions for the others went something like this: \u201cMeal 1: 4 egg whites with \u00bd cup any mixed green vegetables; 1 cup blueberries or strawberries, 2 PCs turkey bacon =\u00a0 26 G protein, 20 g carbs, 8 g fat.\u201d Or: \u201cMeal 4: 8 oz whitefish, 1 cup broccoli, 1 cup spinach, \u00bc cup white rice = 27 G protein, 22 g carbs, 4 g fat.\u201d The plan included one \u201ccheat meal\u201d per week (\u201cso you can have a normal date night,\u201d Arthur explained).<\/p>\n

But trying to plan out my food in that way made me want to die, so I mostly ate Chipotle. I had a routine. I would order three double-chicken burrito bowls on Uber Eats, then get a giant grocery-store container of salad, and eat a big scoop of burrito bowl dumped on top of a pile of salad for every meal. Each order lasted me about a week. I thought it was the closest I could get to following Arthur\u2019s meal plan without actually having to think about what I was eating. In this way, I survived a winter upstate without a car.<\/p>\n

Whenever Arthur checked in on my diet or asked about my weight, I lied. \u201cI\u2019ll weigh myself tomorrow at the gym,\u201d I told him, more than a few times. \u201cI\u2019m bloated now, but I\u2019ll take a pic next week.\u201d<\/p>\n

As we continued working out, we fell into a nice rhythm, and I did see myself growing stronger and leaner as time went on. But I also wasn\u2019t taking very good care of myself, and I started getting careless: During one workout, I was feeling guilty about spending the week in bed avoiding Zoom school, so I tried pushing myself and doubled the weight I used for dead-lift rows. I\u2019d been working out for several weeks and figured my body should be able to handle it.<\/p>\n

There was no sound, but I remember the feeling\u2014a sharp slipping out of place, at the base of my spine\u2014and then a knowing, familiar dread spread throughout my body. \u201cI wanna do legs w u, but I kind of hurt my back yesterday LOL,\u201d I texted Arthur the next day. Then, the day after: \u201cTbh my back is rly bad LOL I think I need to rest it for like a week. I can barely move. I\u2019m going to a PT tomorrow. Lmao.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOmgg. Whattttt\u201d<\/p>\n

I did not know it yet, but I had triggered an old back injury, making it hard to even stand up straight, much less lift a dumbbell. I spent the rest of the summer trying, but mostly failing, to ignore the pain that extended down my legs. Bed rest and acupuncture and massage therapy helped, but the smallest things could trigger a flare-up\u2014lifting a bag of laundry, or sitting on a backless stool for too long, or climbing a steep set of stairs. For the next few years, my life would be oriented around managing this pain, instead of actually doing anything about it, like seeing a doctor or going to physical therapy. I accepted it as simply another layer of my life.<\/p>\n

That fall, Arthur opened his own studio\u2014the BBA (Booties by Arthur) training facility. He announced it on Instagram, posting a video of himself cutting a red ribbon under an archway of black and gold balloons. I hearted the post. It would be years before I tried lifting again.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Equinox. Photograph by Vivian Hu.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Luxury Health Club: Equinox Hudson Yards <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not fitness. It\u2019s life.\u201d That was the Equinox slogan. For years, I had been alternately annoyed by and drawn to the chain of luxury health clubs, which I imagined as being full of private equity analysts and, for a brief moment, Gawker Media employees, who used to receive a membership as part of their benefits package. I had been there as a guest a few times over the years, but I wanted more. It was summer of 2021, everyone was vaccinated, and I\u2019d just received my $1,400 stimulus check. I was going to do as Rilke said and change my life.<\/p>\n

I was lucky, said the membership adviser, a duck-lipped woman, because the company was running a promo. If I signed up before it was over, I wouldn\u2019t have to pay an initiation fee and I\u2019d get a free $150 credit at the Equinox store. For $325 per month, I could have access to almost any Equinox facility in the nation\u2014even the NYC Printing House and Hudson Yards locations, which I coveted for their outdoor pools\u2014and, though the sign-up offer required a twelve-month commitment, the membership adviser assured me I could cancel anytime by lying. \u201cJust say you\u2019re moving for school and email me your course schedule, or send a note from a doctor saying you sprained an ankle or something,\u201d she said. \u201cIt won\u2019t be a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

My sister was away from the city, and I was living in her apartment in Hudson Yards. I decided to splurge. I figured I would go to the gym every day, and in this way I would get my money\u2019s worth. Right away, I fell in love with the Hudson Yards Equinox. It had new steam rooms, an extra-spacious sauna, rainfall showerheads. I would wake up early and head immediately to the gym to take a long, hot shower and drench myself in Kiehl\u2019s amino acid shampoo, then go in the hot tub for a bit, then head up to the roof-deck to work on my novel. I was one of many people typing away at their computers by the pool. I tried other locations\u2014the Printing House location, with its rooftop pool and sundeck; the indoor pool at one of the Upper East Side locations\u2014but nothing compared to Hudson Yards, with its airy caf\u00e9\u2014EAT PRETTY<\/small>, a pink neon sign read at the entrance\u2014located in between the pool deck and indoor hot tub. Whenever I got hungry or bored, I could get a fourteen-dollar ginger tuna poke bowl, or an eight-dollar smoothie called \u201csleepy beauty\u201d (with turmeric, collagen powder, spiced almond milk, and valerian root), or an eight-dollar coconut water, which was served in a real coconut.<\/p>\n

There were always several people taking business calls from the roof-deck, and I liked to eavesdrop, listening to people talk about KPIs or ad spend or, once, what I believe was a man either firing or breaking up with someone. (\u201cIt\u2019s just not a good fit. This will be better for both of us in the long run,\u201d I remember him intoning). Of course, there were a lot of annoying people there, too. It was easy to look at the man arguing with the attendant managing the pool wait list (due to demand, there was often a wait of up to several hours for the outdoor pool in the afternoons and on weekends), or the person complaining that there wasn\u2019t any last-minute availability for the Pilates class she wanted, and wonder: Didn\u2019t these people have jobs? But of course I was there, too, racing in early on a weekday to claim a lounge chair, using up all the eucalyptus-infused towels, signing in to my Zoom pedagogy class\u2014I was still in grad school\u2014from the cafe, sheepishly unmuting myself when we were put into breakout rooms. I was there, filling my water bottle with spa water, tapping the digital kiosk in the women\u2019s locker room throughout the day like a rat in a Skinner box to dispense a tiny plastic comb, a spiral hair tie, Ursa Major face wipes. I\u2019d later pass these out to friends, which made me feel like a beautiful Robin Hood Oprah. (You get a comb, you get an organic tampon, you get a disposable razor!),<\/p>\n

In the end, I didn\u2019t do very much \u201cworking out\u201d at Equinox. I was still recovering from my back injury, but it was more than that. I would sign up for fitness classes, then cancel right before the three-hour cancellation window. I would sign up for barre, or Pilates, or hot yoga, and then the class time would approach and I\u2019d be filled with dread. Even when I did make it to class, I often bailed. Once, I got through ten minutes of a yoga class before I convinced myself I had left the stove on and needed to return home immediately. I hadn\u2019t. Another time, I made it to a barre class, but after I checked in with the attendant, I decided I needed to go back down to the locker room to pee, and then that I needed to shower before I could return to the class, and by the time I was done, the class was over, which was maybe what I had wanted to happen all along.<\/p>\n

Something about the idea of actually exercising at Equinox made me feel deeply anxious and inadequate. That summer, using my promotional sign-up store credit, I bought and then returned three different workout sets\u2014usually some kind of high-tech sports bra and leggings, in coordinated, color-blocked patterns\u2014from the Equinox boutique. I thought that if I could only buy the right pair of $200 leggings, or the perfect $80 sports bra, I would finally become a person who could work out at the gym. But I never found the right set.<\/p>\n

Still, the beauty of the all-access membership was that I could go into any Equinox essentially anywhere, anytime. Whenever I had time to kill\u2014if I needed to use the bathroom or if I had been at a particularly heavy lunch or happy hour\u2014I could slip inside the nearest Equinox and take a shower and steam, buy a green juice, or slather myself in body butter. The morning after a date, I could look up the closest Equinox in Harlem or SoHo or Midtown East or Williamsburg or wherever I\u2019d woken up, be greeted by name at the check-in counter, take an insanely hot shower, then steam out whatever poisons had seeped into my body. Each time, I felt a little closer to becoming the person I was meant to be.<\/p>\n

\"\"

The Equinox Pool. Photograph by Vivian Hu.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Public Government Gym: Taipei City Zhongzheng Sports Center (<\/strong>\u81fa\u5317\u5e02\u4e2d\u6b63\u904b\u52d5\u4e2d\u5fc3)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Summer 2023: I was spending the summer with my mom visiting family in Thailand and Taiwan\u2014our first time seeing them since before COVID<\/small>\u2014and we were in Taipei for the final month of our trip. I hadn\u2019t hung out with anyone my own age in weeks.<\/p>\n

I started going to the Taipei City Zhongzheng Sports Center\u2014a public gym near Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall\u2014because it was both cheap and a twelve-minute walk from our apartment. For fifty Taiwan dollars (about $1.50), I got an hour in the fitness center\u2014a giant room with a large selection of pretty standard, though slightly rusty, workout machines, including four squat racks, a row of treadmills, and stationary bikes. For an additional fee (usually around 50\u2013500 TWD per hour), I could access a table tennis area, a dance studio, a billiards room, a golf room, an air-gun shooting range, a badminton court, an archery field, and even an indoor swimming pool. I availed myself of very few of these options.<\/p>\n

I liked to go on weekday afternoons, when the gym was relatively empty, and do a Stronglifts workout\u2014a barbell workout which I\u2019d learned about on the Reddit forum r\/Fitness\u2014for about an hour. Occasionally, the gym ran a promo: in exchange for paying up front for a two-hour pass to the fitness center, you\u2019d get a free bottle of Pocari Sweat\u2014basically Japanese Gatorade. I always took advantage of this deal. On those days, I would add in a thirtyish-minute treadmill session at the end of my workout, then stretch. To take advantage of the promo, I had to check in and pay for my time in the lobby downstairs and then I received a receipt with a QR code, which I scanned to enter and exit the fitness center area. We were required to bring a towel\u2014I don\u2019t know why, though I suspect it had to do with keeping sweat off the equipment\u2014but anyone who forgot theirs could buy a bright pink hand towel at the FamilyMart next door for a hundred Taiwan dollars (three U.S. dollars). I accumulated several of these towels.<\/p>\n

I loved the Tapei public gym. I could go there, do a workout, then leave without lingering\u2014the opposite of Equinox. It was pure, functional gym. The equipment wasn\u2019t particularly nice, and the bathrooms (which thankfully featured both squat and Western-style sit-down toilets) were humid and smelled especially bad in the summer months, but the gym was centrally located and had all the basics. It was almost never crowded, since most people went to one of the newer, nicer public gyms nearby. Usually, the other people there consisted of a group of older dad types who lifted together with a trainer instructing them, and skinny high schoolers similarly lifting in groups. There was the occasional foreigner, usually working out solo, like I was, but I only saw a few of them the entire summer. It was communal: When I wanted to use a foam roller, which was located behind the fitness center desk, the attendant explained that it was one of the personal trainer\u2019s own foam rollers from home, but that I could use it if I promised to be very careful with it. I started to recognize the regulars and the desk attendants, and we\u2019d smile and nod at one another knowingly, occasionally making small talk at the water fountains.<\/p>\n

This specific public gym was older and thus bigger than a lot of the city\u2019s newer gyms, which were built in a more densely populated Taipei, when real estate was sparse. It lived in the shadow of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, an imposing white monument whose vast scale and height surprised me each time I walked past it, no matter how many times I\u2019d seen it, as if evoking the grand incomprehensibility of the past, of history. Most mornings and evenings, my mom and I did our daily walks through the gardens surrounding the monument\u2014we\u2019d get a vending machine milk tea or coffee, then people watch, observing tourists take photos in front of the cherry blossoms, or seniors doing Qigong, or high school dance groups practice their breakdancing routines on the pavement outside the National Concert Hall. My mother hadn\u2019t lived in Taiwan in over three decades, more than half her life, but seeing these daily rituals made me feel close to her. I felt like I was glimpsing parts of her life from before she had me, when she was just a girl trying to decide what kind of person she should be.<\/p>\n

The Boutique Health Club: ONE Health & Wellness (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania)<\/strong><\/p>\n

I found the space on Google Maps a day after moving to central Pennsylvania, where I was a writer in residence at a nearby liberal arts college for the fall semester. \u201cIt feels like a Zen garden,\u201d one Google review said. ONE Health & Wellness advertised itself as a health studio offering infrared sauna therapy, cold plunge tubs, \u201cfunctional strength training,\u201d and jujitsu. \u201cA cracked teapot serves no tea\u2026\u201d began its \u201cWho We Are\u201d page. \u201cA stressed out, in pain, restless person cannot become the best version of themselves. Only a person who feels completely in control, who is pain-free and highly energetic, can achieve their dreams. This is the philosophy that drives us at ONE.\u201d<\/p>\n

The studio was located in a nondescript brick building on Market Street, and the owner-trainer, Ben, told me to come in for a free consultation. When I arrived at the studio, Ben was sitting barefoot in the lobby, doing work on his laptop. There was a check-in counter in front of a glass refrigerator filled with seltzers and kombuchas alongside a tub of Fage yogurt (Ben\u2019s personal stash). There was a counter with a teakettle and several kinds of tea, as well as a few shelves along the wall, stocked with items like beef-tallow moisturizers (\u201cIt mimics the skin\u2019s natural oils and composition,\u201d Ben told me, which he said made it more effective than traditional lotions) and something called Jocko protein powder (which I did end up purchasing for forty dollars, though I found its monk-fruit-sweetened flavor a bit too cloying).<\/p>\n

Ben asked me about my fitness goals, and I told him that I wanted to build strength and work on my foundations, even though that wasn\u2019t totally true: I really just wanted to become as small as possible. I didn\u2019t voice this, but right away he said, \u201cPeople think being healthy means having a six-pack, or looking like what people in bikini competitions look like. But what they don\u2019t know is that those guys are actually insanely unhealthy a lot of the time. People have no idea what it actually takes to get down to that level of leanness.\u201d<\/p>\n

He taught, instead, what he called \u201cfunctional fitness.\u201d The only equipment inside the studio consisted of a huge area of mats, where we worked out barefoot, and an array of maces, clubs, and kettlebells. \u201cAll the movements we do in here are designed to replicate the movements we do out in the real world,\u201d he told me during our first session. Mace swings, kettlebell swings, overhead presses\u2014all of them were focused on building the dynamic strength required to, say, lift a suitcase into an overhead bin or carry around a tote bag full of books without having debilitating shoulder pain the next day. \u201cWhat do you want to be able to do in your life?\u201d he\u2019d often ask me. \u201cFocus on that\u2014on what you can do,<\/em> rather than what your body looks like, and the looks part will naturally follow.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also discouraged dieting. Unlike the Instagram trainer, Ben told me to focus on getting enough protein\u2014at least one hundred grams per day\u2014and to make sure I was eating enough to build muscle. \u201cYou have to have enough lumber to build the house,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Our workouts were hard at first\u2014whenever I swung a kettlebell between my legs, or tried to swing a mace around my entire body, I envisioned accidentally hitting myself with a steel weight or dropping the mace on my face. I also constantly worried that I might antagonize my back injury. When we did a particularly hard leg day, my back would seize up, and I worried I\u2019d be in for another year of rehab before I could lift again. But Ben encouraged me to move through the pain. \u201cThe worst thing you can do for your body when it\u2019s seizing up like that is not move it,\u201d he told me when I came in the next day. We moved through it, taking it a little easier that day, and eventually the pain did go away. After several weeks of training, about halfway into the semester, I realized that my back pain had not returned\u2014it was, in fact, the first time I\u2019d been pain-free in nearly a decade.<\/p>\n

Ben\u2019s gym space had no mirrors save for a dirty, warped rectangle at the back, behind where the kettlebells were stored, whose warping made things appear wider than they were. I don\u2019t know if that was intentional, but eventually I learned not to look\u2014that it wasn\u2019t the point. Between strength training and eating enough consistently for the first time in my life, I gained muscle and strength\u2014toward the end of the semester, I could see the outline of my triceps when I flexed, and even the beginnings of my abs, which I\u2019d always assumed didn\u2019t exist. I hadn\u2019t lost any weight, and in fact some of my clothes no longer fit, but I had learned to view myself and my body not as something inefficient that I needed to optimize, but as a living organism. Ben had a much longer-term approach to fitness than I\u2019d been conditioned to expect. He emphasized that if I continued what we were doing, strength training two to three times per week and eating enough, I would lean out over three or four years. This was the opposite of the dieting and weight-loss messaging I\u2019d received growing up\u2014the cabbage soup diet taped to my childhood fridge that claimed to shed ten pounds in seven days; the apple cider vinegar \u201ccleanses\u201d and three- or five- or ten-day \u201cjuice fasts\u201d that I\u2019d been encouraged to try throughout my teens and twenties. \u201cYour body is an amalgamation of everything you put into it, and everything you do with it,\u201d Ben told me. \u201cIf you spend all your time hiking, your body will be the body of someone who hikes. If you spend all your time on the couch, your body will be the body of someone who spends all day on the couch. If you\u2019re constantly worrying about dieting, your body will be the body of someone who is constantly worried about dieting. It\u2019s that simple.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the end of the semester, I was sad to leave Pennsylvania\u2014and Ben\u2019s gym\u2014behind. But I was looking ahead. Already, I was on Google Maps, searching for gym spaces in Oakland, where I was moving for the spring. There was a CrossFit studio, a yoga space that offered healing sound baths, a family-owned boutique gym operated out of an old warehouse; a local chain with indoor golf simulators and an Olympic-size pool. There were dance studios and barre studios and running clubs and cryotherapy spas and local YMCA chapters and kickboxing classes and MMA classes and climbing gyms and pole-dancing workshops and even a studio, run by ex-cons, that offered \u201cprison-style boot camps.\u201d All I had to do was pick one, and then become a person who went there.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Vivian Hu is a writer from Texas.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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