Of course, that dream lasted for about forty-five minutes, which remain some of the worst minutes of my entire life, for about a thousand reasons.

I mean, going to the gym isn’t a particularly pleasant experience to begin with, because all gyms are terrible, even the good ones. They smell like hot milk and old rags and garbage bags full of sweaty rubber. There’s always a grown man in the corner grunting wildly at his own reflection, a teenager running dangerously fast on the treadmill so that you’re scared to go anywhere near him, and an old woman who insists on making flirtatious eye contact with you during the entirety of your workout, and you know it’s flirtatious because she’s constantly licking her lips. Plus, none of the machines come with instructions, so you may very well spend an entire hour pulling on what you think is part of a machine that trains your shoulders but is actually just a piece of duct tape attached to a laundry machine that nobody told you not to touch. Gyms, generally speaking, are designed to humiliate and terrify you into emotional vulnerability so that gym employees can get you to buy things you don’t actually want or need.

Already emotionally distressed, I was an easy target for their hunt. Gym employees, like prowling lionesses, can detect weakness, and they smelled my fragility from miles away. They pounced the second I limped through the front door.

“Welcome,” a man with dazzling white teeth and a tight T-shirt shouted when I walked up to the front desk. “Would you like to start off your membership with a free personal training session?” This is the gym predator’s trademark maneuver.

Determined as I was for McConaughey-like results in less than ten weeks, and inclined as I am to accept any free thing that is offered to me, I accepted.

“Wonderful,” he said. “Let’s set you up with a trainer.” And he whistled over a man he introduced as Tim, who led me deep in the gym, far enough away so that I could no longer see the front doors or the light that poured in from outside.