Best Gym
Valencia Street Muscle
333 Valencia (at 14th St.)
San Francisco, CA
431-9700
Maybe you like big corporate chain gyms. They have their perks. The anonymity, the way they jerk you around with the prices and contracts and ask, "How much weight do you want to lose?" Oops, getting bitter ... let's focus on the positive. For those of us not into big corporate gyms, there is Valencia Street Muscle, which plays a lot of Sleater-Kinney over the sound system, and every time we go in there, we see the authors of books we've read. (Local authors of smart and poetic books, that is.) Plenty of the men wear black socks and have beards, and none of them seem interested in using the workout time as pickup time. It has all the usual amenities of a well-outfitted gym, and you can easily walk in and sign up for a month for $70 without all the BS. In fact, its Web site sports a "Prices" page, and you can sign up online. The place is clean but not shiny; it is fine, once inside, to be fat, transgendered, or new to exercising; and did we mention the Sleater-Kinney?
stuey 05/20/2009 9:03:40 PM
I'm glad you've read lots of "smart and poetic books," but I'm not convinced that fatties and trannies are that shunned in any gym in any reasonable city, along with fags and jews and the full lot. You endorse the gym by saying that lots of ugly freaks work out there, so come along, you! As for using gym-time as "pick-up time," a little cruisy-poo never hurt anybody. It's only when you act on it that you get fucked, and then ultimately fucked over -- unless, in a stretch, you end up growing old together and then you die first. And you tell me, dear author, what ANY of that has to do with whether you go to a chain gym or not? Fail of a review. Gym sounds nice, though.