Falstaff and Me
It’s Called a Gym Class
August 29, 2019

by Roscid Cup

“Boot camp,”^* the colloquial term for military basic training, has been terribly misappropriated in recent years, oh say about the past decade now. It is now carelessly tossed about like it doesn’t mean anything anymore. I’m not (yet) talking about “coding boot camps” (don’t you even get me started…). I’m talking about “boot camp” as a substitute for “gym class.” No gym class is any kind of boot camp. Perhaps it’s more so than those coding b— o-o-ooh, I can’t go there yet, one must mind one’s blood pressure — I’ll just say that no gym class is any kind of boot camp.

True, real boot camps have watered down as well. You may recall that the “kinder, softer” military was a popular subject for news shows and magazine articles in the 90s. But some very important distinctions remain, which I will clarify here.

To qualify as a boot camp, a gym class must be able to answer NO to all of the following questions:

1. Are the class participants allowed to go home after the workout?
2. Are the class participants allowed to call home after the workout?
3. Do fewer than two months pass before the class participants are allowed to go or call home?
4. Are the class participants permitted at least six hours of sleep per night?
5. Do the showers have stalls for privacy, or are they at least spaced far enough apart for a class participant to stand a comfortable distance from the naked class participant who is showering right next to him or her?
6. When showering, does a class participant get his or her own shower head (as opposed to having to share it with one or more fellow naked classmates at the same time)?
7. Are the class participants allowed to speak among each other on weekdays and Saturdays?
8. Are the class participants allowed to look left or right at will on weekdays and Saturdays?
9. Are the class participants allowed to move their eyeballs about in their sockets at will on weekdays and Saturdays?
10. Does the class conduct just one workout per day?
11. Are the second, third, fourth, etc., workouts of the day conducted according to a schedule (as opposed to impromptu workouts that were triggered by someone failing to go the full week without violating the above rule about wandering eyeballs)?
12. At any given time after the first week, can at least ninety percent of the class participants conduct the full workout course without being exempted and put on crutches?
13. At any given time after the first week, have fewer than ninety percent of the class participants developed a bizarre sleep disorder? For example, can at least ten percent of the class participants remain standing upright without distractions for at least fifteen seconds before falling asleep and having to take an involuntary step forward?^†
14. During workouts, do the class participants lift things up and put them down?^‡

Additionally, to qualify as a “boot camp” a gym class must be able to answer YES to all of the following:

1. During the first two weeks of the course, do the class participants have the sort of disgusting maladies you typically only see in young children, due to their close contact with so many people from so many places?
2. Does the class instructor turn up the room temperature and drink a freezing cold soda while a workout is in progress?
3. Are the class participants willing to eat anything you put in front of them, no matter how disgusting, after only a few days in the class?
4. Are the class participants exposed to tear gas at least once during the course?
5. Does the U.S. Constitution contain clauses that exempt the class participants from guarantees of certain human rights?
6. Does the class instructor regularly quote Full Metal Jacket with the smug self-satisfaction of someone pretending to have made those lines up themselves?
7. Within mere weeks after finishing the class, do the former class participants begin to label even newer class graduates with the perjorative term “booters?”

Having been a sailor, I’m sure plenty of Marines out there would tell me that I never went to a real boot camp. They can have that, since they’re Marines. Soldiers can too, I suppose, though probably not really; airmen definitely cannot.

But this post isn’t about that. I just wanted to clarify one important bit of terminology, and that is:

It’s called a GYM CLASS, not a BOOT CAMP!

Now get off my lawn, landlubber, and have a fine Navy day.