Meaning no offense to my tuition dollars, the first thing you notice when you walk into the Central Campus Recreation Building (a.k.a. the CCRB, at the corner of Geddes & Washtenaw) is that, well, it’s a dump. The nondescript brick building next to the overpass that thousands of motorists drive under each day reveals nothing on the inside that couldn't be guessed from the outside.

It's not the chronically wet winter floors that they try in vain to dry with heat blowers, the doors separating hallways and levels that stubbornly stick from the vacuumed air pressure, the smell of human sweat that increases throughout the day, or even the ubiquity of old men feeling the need to do everything while naked (e.g. reading the newspaper or having conversations together) in the locker room that turns me off. Instead it's feeling that one just doesn't want to be there for very long that gives me a bad feeling every time I approach. It’s a feeling that I don't even want to be there before I even get there.

And at a school as big as Michigan, which features only three recreation facilities for over 30,000 students, perhaps that feeling of not wanting to stay a while makes sense.

This is a school that features a stadium that holds over 100,000 people, sports teams that perennially compete for league and national championships, and so much swoosh and three-striped gear gracing our collective student body that you’d think we were an Olympic training village, not an academically superior campus. Yet for all our apparent sports-centrism, our main workout facility seems to try to hide behind the trees lining Washtenaw, and once found, asks that if you must come in, please don't stay for too long. In other words, to avoid all 30,000+ of us wishing to ride stationary bikes at once, the gym Michigan provided us with is, well, sort of a dump.

Perhaps as an odd way of experiencing this feeling of hesitancy, this winter I signed up--voluntarily, mind you--for a masochistic weekly workout program called "Boot Camp."

Let me try to explain this: this winter I paid nearly $100 to strip down to shorts, go into a hot room full of people who are younger than me, in better shape than me, and better looking than me, once a week, and have a middle-aged man order me around to engage in activities with names like “Mountain Man,” “Burpies,” and “Kick-Ups” and "Scramble-Ups" and something that is supposed to end up with me doing a hand-stand and doing push-ups at the same time. I don't think there's a name for that one. And if there is, I don't want to know it.

Now, remember: I paid for this.

However, each Tuesday around 3pm, like clockwork, I get cold feet. I feel full. I’m tired. I have a lot to do anyway. Each week is a new and better excuse why I shouldn’t go. It’s nice outside. On no less than two occasions I’ve walked all the way over the bridge from campus to the nondescript building, each step carrying a message to my brain, “You don’t have to do this. It’s not too late. You can leave. I’ll forgive you!” But I go. Each week. And not just because I paid for it. Though sometimes it’s hard to figure out why.

A trip to the CCRB can be the worst of all worlds: the pageantry and performance of a high school dance mixed with the shyness and awful feeling of being an outsider that I remember too well from middle school. And then the oldness. That feeling that you’re old, everyone knows you’re old, and that feebly lifting half the weight of the sorority girls next to you or seemingly bursting into sweat as soon as you even look at an elliptical machine only confirms that you’re old.

Each week at Boot Camp our class of a dozen or so students fills the small wood-floored, mirror-lined room and we sweat to the oldies. Literally. Our Boot Camp instructor ushers us through dozens of non-stop activities while vintage Motown and classic rock reverberate off the spartan surroundings. Like those high school dances, the men are all on one side of the room, and the women on the other. No one told us to do this, but as we move to position ourselves to do bench-presses on top of oversized rubber balls, I'm grateful that I'm a man, in the back row, and conveniently in the far corner.

Though today, after months of being the least athletic in the group, something odd happened. Maybe it was just a late surge of afternoon energy, or the fact that with the early spring weather I've been able to run and workout nearly every day, but whatever it was, I was keeping up with the rest of the group. Ordinarily, I never get the satisfaction of completing an exercise because everyone else finishes before me and I’m forced to move to the next activity already in progress. But today, I felt good. I felt not old. And as I was marveling at that, I realized that I had completed my exercises before everyone else.

And I had no idea what to do.

A few weeks ago I went to the CCRB at 11:30 p.m. I was busy all day and hopped up on caffeine, so I trotted outside under a full moon expecting to have the entire place to myself. On most days going to the CCRB is like playing a slot machine: trying different times in the hopes that you'll hit the jackpot of an empty track or freed-up weights. Early mornings are usually winners, and any time after 4 p.m. is decidedly a loser.

But at 11:30 p.m. I found the place unexpectedly packed. Not only was I not alone, machines were in heavy use and people were bouncing weights off the cracked, rubber floors. I felt my pulse quicken as I went into my normal routine of choosing the machines and exercises that I knew how to do, and knew I could do quickly without drawing attention to myself. After a few minutes, though, I looked around from my midnight elliptical, and realized that these were not the normal people I saw at the gym. These were young women looking for the "go" buttons on their treadmills, men yanking on the rowing machines like they were starting lawn mowers, and nearly everyone with eyes down and a personal job to do. These were my people.

Back in Boot Camp I looked up stunned to see that everyone was still working on the previous exercise, except for one woman who I caught looking at my reflection in the mirror. She wasn’t checking me out or admiring my Burpie acumen, nor was she looking at me to guess my old age or mock my winter whiteness. Instead, she was looking at me as if to say, "What now?" And I didn't know. Neither of us knew. We had to wait till the normal leaders in the class went onto the next thing, and then we followed.

I admit, I have a hard time going to the gym, and once I'm there I do everything I can to get in and get out as quickly as possible. But whether out of the corner of my eye in Boot Camp, or late at night after all the normal people have gone home, I've begun to notice that I'm not alone. More people than I know--and will ever know as long as I rush in and out--don't know what they're doing. None of us really know what we’re doing. We’re old or we’re out of shape or we just don't like talking while naked, which in the end doesn't make the CCRB so much nondescript and dumpy as it does another place we all share whether we want to or not.

Chris Gerben writes about spaces on and around U-M where the campus meets the city. He is a writing instructor and PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education, where he studies the connection between students' online and academic writing. He can be reached at a2cgerben@gmail.com.