One night stand

Most hotels nowadays have some sort of fitness facility. They range in size from “a rickety treadmill and two partially inflated exercise balls” to “a handful of various cardio machines and a set of mismatched free weights” to “a miniature health club with several machines, a spa and a trainer named Rick.”

For the past couple of months, I have been staying at a hotel with an above-average exercise room. There are no deep-tissue massages available post-workout, but as far as I can tell, all of the equipment was manufactured sometime in the last decade. There are three treadmills, two elliptical machines, a recumbent bike, a set of weights and medicine balls, and a rack of clean sweat towels (bonus!).

I’m staying in the middle of a very urban area, which means there aren’t many outdoor running options. (Unless your idea of a workout involves dodging the unsavory characters lurking in city bus stops.) As such, I have become somewhat of an early morning fixture in the hotel gym.

It’s not a bad place to get in a workout, especially if, like most hotel guests, you’re only in town for a couple of nights. The problem for extended-stayers like myself is that everyone else walks through the door knowing that they are probably not going to see you—or anyone else in there—ever again.

It’s kind of like going out in a city where nobody knows you—for one night, you can act like a total ass without having to worry about showing up in your boss’s Facebook feed the next morning. In a hotel gym, you can act like a total ass without having to worry about running into the stranger on the other treadmill at next week’s kickboxing orientation.

Once gym etiquette goes out the window, it’s total anarchy. In this dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself kind of atmosphere, you better snag the equipment you want the moment you see it open.

The way to do this, apparently, is to wipe your sweaty head with a fresh towel and then drape said towel over the piece(s) of equipment you wish to use later. That way, you can hop on the treadmill for another 30 minutes knowing that the 25-pound dumbbells will be waiting for you whenever you’re ready.

While you’re at it, it’s probably a good idea to reserve one of the two benches in the room using another rag soaked in your own perspiration—you know, just in case someone else is thinking about using it sometime in the next half-hour.

Oh, and heaven forbid that you screw up your circuit due to lack of floor space for your burpees. You should definitely go ahead and dibs some real estate using a stretching mat topped with—you guessed it—another damp sweat towel.

When you see another guest circling around “your” bench with a confused look on her face, it’s best to just stare straight ahead and pretend not to notice. She’ll go away eventually. And if she doesn’t, you can always play dumb. (“Oh, oops! I didn’t mean to leave that towel there. Silly me!”)

If she calls you a jerk and storms off, who cares? You’re checking out in 45 minutes, and you don’t plan on returning anytime soon.

Before you leave, though, you should stop by the front desk and lick every apple in the dish of complimentary fruit—just in case your plans change and you end up coming back later.

Lap of luxury

Last week, I had the great fortune of staying at a luxury resort on someone else’s dime. What I saved in dollars and cents, however, was negated by what I paid in pride and dignity.

Here’s the thing: different people have different definitions of “luxury.” Some might consider a lobby full of art galleries, designer stores and five-star restaurants to be “luxurious.”

I, on the other hand, feel that “luxury” implies that all possible needs and desires of each customer have been preemptively identified and addressed. This is why they sell $150 golf shirts 10 feet from the front desk; they anticipated the business executive who checks in and immediately realizes that he has forgotten to pack the proper attire for his afternoon “meeting” on the links. This is also why $5 bottles of Evian water have been strategically placed just steps inside of each hotel room; they anticipated that I would be thirsty after hauling all of my crap through the “luxury” lobby and up to the 12^th floor. (Luckily, I anticipated that everything would be marked up 500% at the resort, which is why I brought my own bottle of water.)

So anyway, you would think they would have anticipated that some guests might have reason to make a discreet entrance through a strategically placed side door, thus bypassing all of the ritzy mumbo jumbo going on in the lobby. Maybe they had a late night at the floating bar. Maybe they passed out on the beach and would rather not take a walk of shame past a five-star restaurant with sand in their hair and the faint smell of expensive liquor emanating from their pores.

Or maybe—just maybe—they are returning from a muddy five-mile lap around the park in warm, humid conditions. Maybe they sweated profusely while running said lap, and as a result collected several freshly killed insect specimens on their forehead. Maybe they would rather not walk though a pretentious “luxury” lobby in sweat-drenched clothes, with a gnat graveyard on their face and fresh mud splatters on their legs.

Trust me, I did my best to avoid the inevitable humiliation that comes with sporting a sweat-soaked T-shirt in a room full of rich people. I knew that there had to be an ultra-secret door for ultra-famous celebrities who didn’t want to cause a scene each time they arrived at the hotel.

Plus, there are plenty of celebrities who work out (or at least attempt to). I mean, come on—Oprah ran a marathon for Christ’s sake. Do you think Ms. Winfrey would have to drag herself through the lobby with a sweaty butt and a buggy forehead after going for a jog with her personal training entourage (and Gayle)? I don’t think so.

Oprah would be whisked away through some special entrance as soon as she arrived, and no one would see or hear from her again until she had been de-bugged and made-up by her 10-person glamour squad.

With few options to choose from, I went with the obvious plan: pretending that I was European royalty.

I looked around nervously, trying to form a look of expectation—mixed with a tiny bit of impatience—on my face. In my mind, my facial expression said, Hel-loooo! Where are my special resort henchman? I need to be escorted to my room immediately. I cannot walk through those doors like a normal person, because I am not a normal person. I’m...uh...the princess of Liechtenstein!

In reality, I probably just looked lost and stupid, like I was thinking, Hmmm…maybe I was staying at some other really huge resort that looks exactly like this one. If only I knew how to read!

Once I realized that the whole faux-fame thing probably wasn’t going to pan out, I jumped right into Plan B: pretending that I was on the hotel staff.

I saw some workers going in and out of what appeared to be a door for maintenance staff. I decided that there had to be some kind of hidden network of hallways for hotel employees so they wouldn’t be traipsing through the luxury lobby all day long. The problem was that I needed what appeared to be an employee-only keycard to unlock the door. I knew I had neither the courage nor the sleight of hand to pull off a successful key heist.

Instead, I slowly moved closer to the door with the intent of slipping in unnoticed the next time it swung open. But of course, I forgot that I’m not smooth enough to pull off a feat like that either. Somewhere between awkwardly bumping into one of the valet guys and narrowly avoiding a door-to-face collision, I realized that I was just going to have to suck it up and speed-walk through a crowd of millionaires, pretending that I didn’t have a beachball-sized sweat splotch on my back.

With as much pride as I could muster, I marched through the revolving glass door, past the concierge desk, past the fancy art gallery with the snooty attendant, past the shop with the annoyingly perfect piles of folded golf shirts, past the posh cocktail lounge where all of the trophy wives were sipping on $17 appletinis.

By the time I arrived at the elevators, I was certain that most of the resort patrons were pointing and whispering about how disgusting I looked. I pressed my sweaty index finger on the “up” button repeatedly. I swear I stood there longer than it took Oprah to run that marathon.

When I finally got back to my room, I closed the door and breathed a sigh of relief. I was pretty sure I couldn’t show my face downstairs for the rest of the night. Fortunately, they anticipated that, which is why there was a room service menu conveniently placed next to the phone.

Oh, to live in the lap of luxury!