24 Hours at the World's Hippest Gym

24-Hour Sweaty People By GUY TREBAY , New York Times

COME 7 a.m. the hard-core types have already been and gone, the ultramarathoners in training, the laser-focused triathlete working toward another Ironman, the body-image compulsives and exercise-bulimics with their sinewy limbs and the telltale coating of downy forearm hair. Let us not omit mention of the onetime male porn star, the guy with the bloated Popeye muscles and nipples so distended they resemble elevator buttons: Floor please! Most every weekday the Lafayette Street outpost of Crunch Fitness is that place of New York fable, an establishment that remains open 24 hours.

Contrary to all the Sinatra hype about the city that never sleeps, sidewalks tend to get rolled up by midnight in most parts of town. Yet while ordinary folks might have long since nodded off watching Letterman or washed down an Ambien and yanked the covers over their heads, gym people can still be found pumping and cycling and sweating at every hour. This I discovered after deciding recently to stage an ultramarathon of my own: that is, to see what it was like to spend 24 hours at a gym. (In two shifts, to be truthful; I tried it in one stint and could not go the distance.)

My reasons were various, random in some sense and also derived from a decades-long curiosity about a locale social scientists refer to as "the third place," a fixed place in a psychic triangle whose other points are work and home. Gyms figure in the lives of at least the 41.3 million Americans who currently belong to some kind of fitness club. They are places of refuge, escape, self-improvement or abasement and, for those who never get past the sign-in phase, rebuke. Yet, although membership numbers have not stopped climbing in the 19 years since the fitness industry began counting, Americans are slouching ever couch-ward toward epidemics of disease linked to sins the Puritans would recognize, like indolence and sloth.

"The sedentary culture that has emerged in this country in the last 30 years has had a devastating effect on our nation's health," said John McCarthy, the executive director of the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association, alluding in part to alarming current rates of childhood obesity and also to a creeping rise in the adult-onset diabetes that medical science links to being overweight. Last week, for its third consecutive year, the group sponsored an initiative (www.getactiveamerica.com) in which 1,200 participating health clubs opened their doors free to the public for a day.

Simultaneously, association members went to Capitol Hill to lobby for the Workforce Health Improvement Program Act, a proposed extension of tax benefits provided by the government to employers maintaining fitness programs. "The current tax laws allow for on-site fitness facilities to be tax deductible, but not offsite," said Brooke Correia, a spokeswoman for the organization. This perhaps explains the Pilates class held every Wednesday in certain corporate auditoriums. The proposed law aims to make it easier for employers to subsidize health club memberships through tax cuts, thus making a dent in the roughly $77 billion spent yearly on medical problems related to inactivity. As recently as 1987, a mere 17.3 million Americans were members of a health or fitness club. As it happens, that was about when I myself joined a gym in the hope of effecting a personal physical transformation from weedy scribbler to supertoned manly man.

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