| PATTEN RATS
Smart kids, plain and simple, don't exercise the way meatheads do.
Your run-of-the-mill health club beefcake throws a lot of weight around, emits grunts that put Monica Seles to shame, and sports a barbed-wire tattoo on his arm. He listens to metal, has a tan and lifts weights like it were his job. It might even be his job.
NU's workout heads aren't meatheads. They have a personality of their own, albeit a muted one. They're physically-conscious folks. Club sports kids. Or techies. Ex-athletes. Or just geeks, trying to be geeks with biceps. They're Patten Rats.
Not a lot of grunting in Patten, not much metal either. Males, mostly pale, shuffle from bench to machine to bench, often recording their lifts (weights/reps) in small notebooks, more for reference than nostalgia. Short haircuts dominate the scene, as do cross trainers, basketball shorts and t-shirts commemorating high school sporting events. The music usually sticks to Q101, a soundtrack played loud enough to drown out awkward social exchanges that dominate Rat chatter – "You on that bench," "Hey, I've got a set left" and "Can I get a spot?" With their notebooks and their schedules (same time, three, even four times a week), Rats proudly organize a workout like this week's problem set. They dutifully eschew the glamour and the girls of SPAC for a dingy basement on Lincoln and Sheridan, chasing dreams of a six-pack or a 300-pound max on the bench. NU takes its applicant pool light on the brawn, but Patten's Rats are as close as it gets.
- Luke Winn | At 2/8/03 7:41 AM, | | wrote: | |
| At 1/11/03 1:48 PM, | | wrote: | |
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| At 4/22/02 10:31 PM, | | wrote: | | Nice Profile |
| At 3/13/02 12:23 AM, | | wrote: | | right |
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