Going to the gym during the coronavirus

For posterity, this is a guide on how to safely go the gym during a global pandemic.

Step 1. You fear for your life that you might catch a disease that could make you lose your sense of smell and taste for a couple of weeks, or worse.

A wide variety of effects, ranging from nothing to death brings out in you several layers of swinging anxiety.

It could be the loss of smell and taste for a couple of weeks, or a month or two; or it could be severe pain and an incapacity to breath at the point where you would need an artificial external pump to push oxygen into your lungs; or it could be fatal; or it could be nothing at all!

Step 2. You feel like doing physical exercise to keep the anxiety at bay and to be healthier in case you actually catch the damn thing.

You feel that.

Step 3. You find out that your local gym offers information on their occupancy in real-time on their website.

Browsing on your gym website, you find out that they publish the occupancy in real-time. The occupancy is a number between 0 and 100, expressed in percentage in this instance, which indicates how many people are inside the gym at any given moment.

If the occupancy is 100% it means that it’s full, it has reached the maximum number of people allowed in simultaneously. If it’s at 0, it means that it’s empty and etc. You get the point

Step 4. You write a web crawler that every 5 minutes reads that occupancy number from your gym website.

You have a little time on your hands. Since you’re not going to the gym and you’re at home all day, you have more free time than usual. And free time it’s a playfield for the swinging anxiety we spoke of at step number 1.

So you decide to write two pieces of software to keep your mind busy with something productive.

The first program it’s a web crawler, that at regular intervals of time visits your gym website and it parses its content. It finds the occupancy number and then it saves this number to a database file together with a timestamp.

The other piece of software reads the database file and plots a nice little chart of the occupancy as a function of time.

Percentage of occupancy of my local gym as a function of time separated by day of the week. In blue, historic data from a sliding window of the past three weeks. In red, today’s data.

As you can see, when I saved this chart it was Friday and that day’s trend was following quite well the historical Friday’s trend.

Step 6. You don’t even realise that you skipped step number 5.

Remember the anxiety? It’s still hovering beneath the surface.

Step 7. You write a new personal website from scratch that under an undisclosed and private URL shows you the continuously updated gym occupancy chart.

After a while you get bored of continuously running your second script to see the updated occupancy chart, so you decide to get a private virtual server. You set your first program to run as a service there and you port the second program into the backend of your website. Because, let’s be honest, it’s much easier to press F5 than to press enter to run a script that pops up a new window on your desktop then close it and press enter again.

Step 8. You figure out that the only good time to go to the gym has shifted to really early in the morning.

By looking at the chart it might become clear to you that the other gym users have changed their routine, accustoming to the new Covid-19 way of life. The occupancy distribution that used to peak around very busy hours has flattened because people are trying to go to the gym when there’s as little people as possible. This means that if you want to keep going when there’s almost nobody — because let’s face it, that’s also when you can enjoy it the most regardless of the contagious virus that is going around — you have to go even earlier or even later than you used to.

You notice the secondary peak between 23:00 and midnight from people who don’t have a broader overview of the occupancy, i.e. didn’t follow this post’s eight great and easy steps, and think that 23:00 to 24:00 is a magical hour to show up without realising that many others also had the same idea.

FYI, you also notice that the threshold of occupancy for when you can use the equipment comfortably and you can avoid breathing down the neck of others and vice versa, it’s at about 25–30% (for this particular gym). In the morning you can get away with a little bit more, e.g. 40% because in the morning there are more users interests in doing only cardio activities (treadmill, elliptical, stationary bike, and similar) and therefore the weights and callisthenics areas are not as busy. Basically in the morning people are distributed more homogeneously around the various areas of the gym, instead of being concentrated around a single one.

So finally you figure out that the only decision left to take is to completely change your sleep routine and wake up at around 6:00 or 6:30 to enjoy your gym time at 7:00.

Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!