My doctor looked right over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses and told me I needed to start exercising before my joints rusted completely shut. He used words like cardiovascular health and core stability. I just nodded and figured he was probably right since bending down to tie my work boots had recently started sounding like a bag of dry kindling snapping in half.

The next morning I drove past the local community center and saw a place called Iron Works Fitness with a flashing neon sign out front.

I figured exercise was exercise, whether you did it in the yard hauling bags of mulch or inside a climate-controlled room with mirrors on the walls. I parked my old truck, walked through the glass double doors, and immediately felt like I had wandered onto a movie set for people who ate raw oats and drank liquid spinach.

Everyone inside was lifting heavy iron plates that clanked together like church bells on Sunday morning. They were breathing hard, wearing matching spandex, and looking around with the kind of intense focus usually reserved for bomb disposal squads. I was wearing a faded gray cotton t-shirt with a grease smudge near the pocket and my everyday slip-on shoes.

A young fellow with arms the size of Thanksgiving hams and a clipboard tucked under his arm walked right over to me. He had a smile that looked like it had been practiced in front of a mirror until the edges stopped hurting.

He stopped two feet away, looked me up and down with professional interest, and said, “First time here?”

I shifted my weight from one sore foot to the other and said, “First time in twenty years, to be honest with you.”

He nodded like he was appraising a used tractor at a county auction. “Well, we can fix that. What’s your fitness goal?”

I looked past his shoulder at a wall-mounted television playing a loop of people running up mountains in the snow. Then I looked back at him and said, “I’d like to tie my shoes… without making weird noises.”

He blinked once, waiting for the punchline, and when none came, his face softened into something resembling genuine respect. He nodded very seriously. “Excellent goal.”

Before I could ask what came next, he turned around, walked over to a rack of rubber-coated weights, and came back holding two heavy metal lumps by the handles.

He handed them straight to me without warning. My knees wobbled two inches downward the second the weight hit my palms.

I looked down at the numbers stamped on the side and said, “I don’t even carry groceries this heavy.”

He tapped the top of my right shoulder with two fingers and said, “Give me ten reps!”

I shook my head and said, “I’ll give you one really emotional rep.”

I planted my feet on the rubber mat, took a deep breath of the overly sanitized air, and tried to lift the things up toward my chest like I had seen the fellows on television do. After thirty seconds of grunting that made the guy next to me drop his barbell, I was breathing like I’d climbed Mount Everest in a wool sweater. My arms felt like they were made of wet cement.

The trainer leaned in close, smiling that bright, terrifying smile, and asked, “Feeling the burn?”

I wheezed out a breath and said, “No… I’m feeling retirement.”

He laughed, but I wasn’t joking in the slightest. My left shoulder was clicking out a rhythm that sounded like a telegraph machine, and my lower back had started sending sharp little warning flares up my spine.

I handed the weights back to him before my fingers gave out entirely.

“I think that’s about enough of the Olympic training for today,” I told him, wiping a bead of sweat off my forehead with the back of my thumb.

He tried to talk me into a thirty-day trial package with personalized nutrition plans and foam rollers, but my mind was already made up. I thanked him for his time, walked back out through the glass doors, and got into my truck with the profound relief of a man who had narrowly survived a natural disaster.

I canceled my gym membership before I even pulled out of the parking lot, losing my fifty-dollar sign-up fee in the process. It was the best money I ever spent to keep my bones intact.

Now I get all my exercise the old-fashioned way, which mostly consists of looking for my reading glasses. I take off my glasses to read the newspaper, set them down on some mysterious flat surface, and then spend the next three hours retracing my steps from the kitchen to the back porch and back again.

I hide them so often around the house that I hit 10,000 steps before breakfast just trying to find where I left the wire frames. My wife Helen watches me pace back and forth between the sofa and the pantry every morning, shaking her head while she drinks her coffee. She knows better than to offer help because she’s usually the one who finds them sitting on top of the microwave or tucked inside the pocket of my winter coat.

My doctor asked me at my follow-up checkup last week if I was keeping up with my routine. I told him I was getting plenty of daily movement and hitting my distance goals every single morning without fail. He smiled and marked something down on his clipboard, looking quite pleased with himself. I didn’t see any reason to mention that my cardio routine involved tearing apart the sofa cushions because I couldn’t remember where I put the bifocals I needed to read the thermometer.