Half Over

In the summer of 2024, I began craving hard exercise. I hadn’t done any exercise more intense than walking since well before the birth of my second child two years previously. I hadn’t been to a group exercise class since the pandemic. But, one June day, I went to a class at my local Barre3 studio. 

A cheerful, red-headed instructor welcomed me into the space, which was bright and pretty, with exposed brick and large windows. Enormous mirrors covered the walls. In between excruciatingly difficult sets, which involved small weights or body weight alone, I scrutinized my appearance in them. By the end of class I was sweat-soaked and red. I could barely make it down the three flights of stairs from the studio. I was sore for days afterwards.

When the soreness dissipated, though, I signed up for another class, and another, and so on. Eventually I bought the monthly membership. For the past year and a half I’ve been taking multiple barre classes a week. As of this writing, I have completed 191 classes.

There have been dozens of think pieces over the past decade about the ways in which group exercise has replaced religion in modern life. The authors cite the fact that more people go to the gym than to church, that there is an almost religious fervor around particular kinds of exercise, like CrossFit. I believe it wholeheartedly, of course, especially during the breath portion of a Barre3 class, at the end, when the instructor tells us to lie down with our eyes closed and guides us through a deep breathing exercise together. What else is that but a modern day prayer, focused exclusively inward? 

When I was a teenager I bought the New Testament on cassette tape from Goodwill. I was on my high school cross-country and track teams; I ran a lot at the time. On the off-season or on weekends, when I ran alone, I would listen to the New Testament.

Looking back I believe this was at least partly motivated by a desire to seem quirky. It was peak manic pixie dream girl era; Garden State had just been released. I was trying to cultivate an air of seductive insanity. Or maybe I was trying to seem intellectual, as if I, a fifteen-year-old in Southwest Missouri, had the soul of an artist. 

But I also think, more charitably, that I was seeking to understand something: Christianity, a force that dominated life in my hometown and in which I had little to no anchor. Though I had been baptized and attended Catholic school through first grade, my parents had never been very religious. They left the church when I was six or seven. By Bible Belt standards, Catholicism wasn’t even Christian anyway. 

Listening to the New Testament on tape did nothing to dispel my confusion regarding Christianity. I knew the Bible was supposed to contain parables, but the stories had no obvious meaning. When I could discern meaning, it was contradictory, totally at odds with whatever else I’d gleaned. 

Around the same time, I began attending various churches on Sundays. I didn’t know what anthropology was at the time, but if I did I would have considered this something of an anthropological study. I wanted to understand why people went to church. I was not looking for god and I did not find him.

Still, the experiment was worthwhile. I drank grape juice out of plastic cups. I sat next to old women. Once, I watched a young mom be baptized in a pool suspended above the stage of a mega church.

I thought that Christianity was the underlying force that explained the city in which I was raised. I thought I would understand something about the place if I listened to the New Testament or went to church. It wasn’t until years later, when I moved back as an adult, that I came to believe that Christianity mattered only insofar as it correlated to conservative politics, which were also omnipresent and oppressive, but better explained the ways in which the city did and, mostly didn’t, care for people, though Christianity was used as a cover for all of it.

Barre3 is a national chain, with studios throughout the U.S. It emphasizes inclusivity; its advertisements look like college admission pamphlets, featuring instructors and members of every size and shade. 

Thanks to barre, here in middle age, I’m in the best shape of my life. I have more muscle mass than I’ve ever had. After an especially difficult barre class, my patience for my children and husband expands tenfold. Because I am so physically exhausted, I am almost incapable of being stressed out, the low-level anxiety I usually have is all but gone, flushed out by the sweat and endorphins.

Despite all of the clear benefits to my mental and physical health, I am often angst ridden over the price tag. My barre membership is, on balance, the most expensive thing I’ve ever bought for myself as an adult, discounting going to college and giving birth to my children in the hospital. I pay almost $200 a month for the privilege of attending this sleek corporate studio, with its free Q-tips and micellar water in the bathroom. Ever since I joined I’ve been looking for a way out, a cheaper option. A few months in I stopped my membership and, over eight weeks, took every class the YMCA offered, hoping to find something that was even remotely comparable. I didn’t, and I came back to barre, grudgingly.

That’s what drew me to another barre studio in town last week: the price tag. Through a promotional special this other studio is running, I could get a month’s membership for about a quarter of what I currently pay. I signed up for a free trial class. 

The studio is in a med spa, so there was a person getting a facial when I arrived, and several others waiting to get Ozempic prescriptions or Botox. The woman at the front desk showed me the bathrooms, told me that they always stock nontoxic health and beauty items that I was welcome to use. I noted immediately that no Q-tips were available, but otherwise the selection was similar to what I was accustomed to.

The class, however, was not good. The instructor was fine and the workout was pleasant enough, but unlike at my normal studio, nearly half of the students were men. They all had a desperate air about them, which I can only describe as divorced dad energy.

Divorced dads are a pathetic group in the same way that middle-aged women like me are pathetic, regardless of marital status. While I wish that we lived in a world that recognized all people’s inherent value, I appreciate that there is gender equality in at least this one small way. Like middle-aged women, divorced dads are to be pitied. In class, I was embarrassed for the dads, for the unenviable situation they’d found themselves in, the fact of their divorce, which I believed to be their fault, caused by their childlike need to be right at the expense of their wives and families, their selfishness, their self-absorption. 

My normal studio focuses on functional movement, which is good, but the instructors talk about this focus during the workouts, which is bad. When I’m struggling through an obscene number of squats, the last thing I want to hear is how the exercise will help me bend down to get something at the bottom shelf at the grocery store, or carry my kids when they’re whining to be picked up. I don’t understand how this isn’t obvious to those in decision-making positions at Barre3, but saying these things during the workout is antithetical to why their core constituency (middle-aged women) attends class. We are there to escape from our lives, from our children, and from the grocery store. Tell me that squats will make my ass look better, tell me I’m getting ripped, but don’t you dare tell me that I’m getting better at grocery shopping.

The divorced dad class got this part right, at least: during a particularly challenging arm block in which we alternated shoulder presses and tricep pulses, the instructor reminded us that barre came out of ballet, that it’s meant to make us all that much more graceful, give us the bodily control and poise of a dancer. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I almost believed, there in that hot basement studio, that I was capable of one day becoming a ballerina.

After class the man next to me told me he had signed up for the men’s vitality package, which included barre, and that this was his first class. He explained that the men’s vitality package was for weight loss, a clarification I welcomed since I had assumed it had something to do with his penis. During class he was completely lost, doing the moves incorrectly, breathing heavily right away, so inflexible. While we put our weights away I glanced at his hand. To my surprise I saw he was wearing a wedding ring, not a divorcé at all. 

Earlier this year I went to Olympia, Washington for a few days. I thought it might be fun to take a hot yoga class while I was there, but it was a nightmare. At the studio near my AirBnb, the instructor led the class with sharp breaths and grunts that correlated to small, precise movements. Everyone else knew exactly what to do. The instructor corrected me over and over again. The room was sweltering. Even though I was barely moving, I was dripping in sweat. “Could this possibly be good for me?” I wondered. 

When the class ended, I left as quickly as I could. The instructor caught me near the door. “This was your first hot yoga class,” he said. It wasn’t a question. 

But he was wrong. In the 2010s I took many hot yoga classes in Missoula, Montana. I was in my early twenties and my coworkers and I would sometimes go to a fancy studio downtown. It wasn’t exact or confusing, or even all that hot. It was just pleasantly warm, which was so welcome in the cold Montana winter. I loved it so much that I enthusiastically registered for a hot yoga class through the local parks board—looking for a deal as ever—which turned out to be held in a carpeted classroom with a bunch of plug-in space heaters, not the same as the fancy studio at all.

Part of going to barre, probably even the biggest part, if I’m being honest, is about looking good. Barre3 studiously avoids saying this, in the name of empowerment, but it’s the thinnest lie. During hard sets the instructor will say (presumably as instructed by corporate headquarters) to focus on “your why” or “find your why.” They mean the reason we’re in class, and they sometimes offer high-minded, aspirational answers: for yourself, for your kids, for your community. But isn’t the real answer, for most women there, that we want to look better? And so what, if that’s the case? Why not just say it? 

Last summer we camped with friends near Lake Pend Oreille, the deepest lake in Idaho, the 5th deepest lake in the U.S. In the morning, after we packed our tents away, we walked to the lake. The kids got in with ease, but the water was so cold that my husband could only get in for a few seconds. Not me. I got in and swam all the way out to the buoy, almost losing feeling in my toes, everything clearer when I got out, as is it when one has been in cold water. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to do it before barre. Barre has improved my fitness, but it has also improved my ability to tolerate discomfort. Thanks to barre, I could withstand the cold water. 

Above the lake, the mountains were a dark blue against a light blue sky. I sat on the rocky beach with Shawn, my friend who takes barre classes with me. We talked about our husbands and kids while our husbands, sitting nearby, presumably talked about whatever men talk about together, which seems to be nothing at all. The kids insisted they weren’t cold even though their lips were blue, teeth chattering. On the way home we stopped for lunch at Dairy Queen.

At my father-in-law’s funeral, my brother-in-law was unable to carry the urn at the end of the service, so my husband did it at the last minute. He stood up from the pew, walked down the aisle, unbuttoned his suit jacket in a smooth, practiced way and bowed to the crucifix above the altar. Then he picked up the urn that contained what was left of his dad and walked down the aisle of the church.

It was the closest to an altar boy I’ve ever seen him, my husband who stopped believing in god at fourteen, despite his large Catholic family. Later I wondered what about the scene was so attractive to me. Did I like him cosplaying as a religious man? Or did I just like seeing a different side of him after all these years together?

During the funeral, the priest told us that we still had a relationship with my husband’s dad, my father-in-law, my kid’s grandpa. The relationship is different now, he told us, but it’s still there. It hasn’t ended. I found his words so comforting. I didn’t need to believe in god to see that they were true.

Rarely do I take online barre classes, though they are available for free with my membership. It’s different over video, alone in a room. The workouts feel much harder and yet I barely break a sweat. Shawn says she likes taking classes in the studio because seeing all the different body types makes her embrace her own body and its flaws. That’s not true for me. I like working out with a group because I want to win the class. When I see someone lifting more weight than me, getting lower in her squat, more forcefully step tapping, I want to beat her. It’s motivating, the competition I feel against all the other poor, unknowing women in barre class. 

A few weeks ago my husband took his mom to Mass, sat with her during the service. Later he told me it was nice. For the first time I can remember, he agreed with me that there is something appealing about taking a little time each week to think about something bigger than oneself, to try to be a better person. I thought maybe something had shifted. But then he said the amount of gold in that one church could feed all the hungry people in town for years, and it quickly shifted back for both of us.

There is a rottenness inside of me. I am a mean person, someone who judges people in exercise class, who has a vendetta against divorced dads, who takes things for granted, who makes wild and unfair assumptions, who wastes huge swaths of time looking at dumb shit on her phone. I want an external source to save me from myself, from my worst impulses and coping mechanisms.

Group exercise can’t replace religion because group exercise is focused on the individual. And yet, at least in my experience, much of religion is, too. The closest thing I’ve found to what I think I need is socialist politics, which encourages one to put the good of the collective above one’s own self interest. But that too isn’t enough: there are too many minutes in the day, too much time to be wasted on ill-advised pursuits, too much rottenness to contain. 

My life is—according to the actuarial tables​​—half over. For the first half I thought I was swimming towards something, but now I think there was never anything there at all, I was just swimming. I have reached the middle of the lake, the deepest, coldest part. So much is crystal clear to me: the failures of the whole system, the rottenness of it all. But there is goodness, too, it’s just less clear, less nameable. When I get my arms around it, to point to it, to write it down, to say anything of substance, it flows through my fingers, like words on a cassette tape, like sweat on the floor of a barre studio, like cold water, like reciting a rosary, when the prayer is less meaning and more mantra.