Day 3. Strength 8.3. Stamina 7.3. Agility 6.2. Intelligence 8.0, same as the day I got it.
The key stuck.
I stood out there in the dark in front of Grindstone for probably ninety seconds working it back and forth in the lock, absolutely certain that this was it, that I'd found the one way to get fired off a job before I'd started it. Then the whole cylinder gave about a quarter turn all at once and the door came open.
There's a trick to it, it turns out. You have to pull the door toward you while you turn. Coach never mentioned that. I found out four days later that she never mentions it to anybody, and that watching a new person figure out the front door is one of maybe three things she finds funny.
Inside, at four forty in the morning, with the lights off, a gym is a strange place. Everything's shapes. The racks are big and black against the window light and the smell is there but colder somehow, like it settled overnight.
The light switches are behind the counter, six of them, and there's a piece of masking tape over each one with the order written in marker. 1 through 6. You turn them on in order because number four is a bad breaker and if you hit it cold it throws the whole back half.
That's the kind of thing this place is made out of.
* * *
The list was taped to the counter.
MOP FLOOR (bucket in back, the grey one, NOT the yellow one)
WIPE RACKS
CHALK BOWLS
UNLOCK BATHROOM
COFFEE — 6 SCOOPS — IT IS ALWAYS 6
I mopped the floor of a gym at four forty-five in the morning.
I had a bachelor's-degree-shaped hole in my life, no money, and a letter on my file that made a computer reject me in under two seconds nine times in one day. And I was pushing a grey mop bucket around a concrete floor in the dark for thirteen dollars an hour.
And it was the best I'd felt in two years.
I don't have a good explanation. Part of it was that it was a task, and I knew how to do it, and when I was done it would be done. I hadn't had one of those in a long time. Everything in my life for two years had been the kind of problem that's never finished.
Part of it was the coffee. Six scoops, always six, in marker on tape where nobody could argue with it.
* * *
The first one came in at five on the dot.
Big guy, sixties, grey mustache, carrying a gallon jug of water and a paperback. He looked at me, looked at the counter, looked back at me.
"You're not Coach."
"No sir."
"Huh." He signed the clipboard. "You mop that?"
"Yeah."
"Did the corners?"
"Yes sir."
"Hm." And he went to go set up at the far rack, and that was the entire conversation, and I found out later from Annette that Hector had told her I was "probably going to work out okay," which apparently is about as far as he goes on anybody.
They came in over the next twenty minutes. There are six regulars on the five a.m., which Coach had told me, but she hadn't told me they're the same six every single day, at almost the same minutes, and that the whole hour runs like a train schedule.
Hector, retired from the post office, deadlifts and reads a western between sets.
Annette, who's a nurse and comes in after a twelve-hour night shift, which the first time I heard it I thought she was joking.
The Vogel brothers, who come in together, train together, and in three days said a combined total of about nine words to me, all of them "morning."
Priya, who's there at five twenty because she has three kids and this is the only hour of the day that belongs to her, and who talks more than the other five put together.
And Wendell, who's in his fifties, has been coming here eleven years, and will tell you about all eleven of them if you stand still.
"You're the new kid," Priya said, on her way past to the rower.
"Miles."
"Miles. Okay." She got on the rower. Then, over her shoulder, "You mopped under the rack. Nobody mops under the rack."
None of these people are important to this story. They're not secretly powerful and none of them turned out to be somebody. They're six people who lift weights before work.
But I'd spent two years in a house by myself, and I hadn't said good morning out loud to anybody but the woman next door in a long time, and on the third day Annette started bringing me a coffee from the place on the corner because she said mine tasted like a penny.
That's all. I just want it in here.
* * *
Coach came in at seven, which is when I found out that the job is two jobs. Five to seven you run the desk. Seven to noon she's there, and she teaches, and you're one of the people she teaches.
"Show me an air squat," she said.
I did an air squat.
"Again. Slower."
I did it slower.
"Again. Stop at the bottom."
I stopped at the bottom, and she came around the side of me and studied me from about eight inches away for what felt like an hour.
"Okay," she said. "You've got two problems and they're the same problem."
And then she spent forty-five minutes taking it apart.
I'm not going to write all of it out. The short version is that my heels were coming up, which meant my ankles were stiff, which meant my knees were going where they wanted instead of where I was putting them, and that every squat I have ever done in my life was a slightly different squat from the one before it.
"You've been strong," she said, "and you've been using strong to cover for not knowing what you're doing. Which works fine right up until the weight gets heavier than the cover."
"I've been training two years."
"You've been exercising two years. It's not the same word." She tapped my heel with the cane. "Down. Heels."
The correction I could take. What got me was that it was hard. An air squat. No weight. Just my own body, done correctly, and by the third set of ten my legs were shaking like I'd been under a bar.
At one point I said, "This is embarrassing."
And Coach said, "Good," and didn't elaborate, and made me do ten more.
* * *
Now, the reason all of this mattered so much to me had nothing to do with squats, and I couldn't tell her about it.
Ever since she said that thing about a third of it bleeding out sideways into the ground, I'd had a question sitting in my chest that I couldn't put down.
Does the system care how well I do it?
Because if it doesn't, fine, I've lost nothing. But if it does, if a sloppy session and a clean session are two different things as far as my trait is concerned, then I have been running at partial credit for three days and I have no idea how much of it counted. And worse, I'll keep doing it forever, and I will never find out, because there's no one to compare against and nothing to check it with.
So I designed an experiment on a legal pad on my fridge like an absolute lunatic, and it goes like this.
Same exercise. Same volume. Same time of day. Two different days.
Day one I do it my old way. The way I've been doing push-ups since I was sixteen, hips sagging, elbows out, ribs open, ugly but honest effort, all the way to failure.
Day two I do the exact same number Coach's way. Hollow, ribs down, elbows in, every single rep the same rep.
Then I look at what the screen says, and I compare.
It's not a great experiment. I know that. There's a hundred things wrong with it. I'm the only subject, there's no control, I'm more tired on one day than the other, and I can't even be sure I'm doing the sloppy version the same amount of sloppy each time. If my mother could see the methodology she'd have something to say about it.
But it's the only experiment anybody on Earth is in a position to run, and I'm the only one who can run it, and nobody is coming to do it for me.
So I ran it.
* * *
I got the sloppy day out of the way on Wednesday. Coach had spent that morning on my ankles, which hurt and didn't count for anything. Forty push-ups to failure, my old form, out on the patio at eight at night. Got the screen. Strength +0.1. Nothing unusual.
Thursday was the clean day.
Forty push-ups. Coach's version. Every rep.
I got to nineteen.
Nineteen. Out of forty. I lay there on my mom's purple mat on the patio with my arms going and I could not make number twenty happen, not with anything I had. Same body. One day apart. A little over half the number.
Which told me something on its own, and I sat up on the mat with my arms hanging and actually laughed about it, because it's such a stupid, obvious, humbling thing to learn at eighteen.
I'd thought I was strong. I'd been strong at something easier than what I thought I was doing.
I sat there on the patio in the dark and waited for the screen.
It didn't come.
I gave it a minute. Two. Went inside, drank some water, came back out. Sat down on the step.
Nothing.
No Strength +0.1. No notice. Not a single pixel of blue anywhere in my backyard.
And I sat there for a good while with my heart going, running through it. Did the clean version not count? Was it under some threshold, was nineteen just not enough volume, had I broken something —
And then I remembered the morning.
Thursday morning. Coach had me on air squats and lunges and farmer carries for forty-five minutes and my legs had shaken through every set, and at nine in the morning I'd gotten a screen in the middle of the gym and had to keep my face still about it.
And then I'd done a second set of hard things at eleven. And gotten another one.
Strength. Two tenths. Before I ever got home.
I put my head back against the block wall and swore at the sky.
Three days into having a plan and I'd already learned the actual lesson the hard way, which is that I'm not running a training program anymore, I'm running a budget, and I'd spent Thursday's entire strength allowance on a warm-up before I ever got to the thing I actually needed to measure.
Days are the currency. I'd written it down myself. I'd underlined it.
And I'd still gone and blown one.
I set the alarm for four fifteen and went to bed angry.