Noticing it feels like cold water splashing on my face. I finish a set, look at the mirror, and unfortunately, my eyes wander. With a mind of their own, they move five degrees to the left, and through mirror reflection, I’m forced to see the temporary resident of the incline bench next to me. It’s currently a mutant, someone who has undergone thousands of surgeries and genetic mutations. That’s my leading theory I use to rationalize how effortless he looks curling dumbbells that I, nor my future self, will ever lift. It’s okay though; I am used to this. My goal isn’t to admire his strength, and it isn’t to make myself feel worse for lifting a measly portion of what he’s holding. It’s to collect data for an informal study I have been conducting: am I really the only one who’s glasses to the gym?

63.7% of Americans wear glasses. I wear glasses. I’ve worn them since the first grade. I’ve owned at least twelve pairs, some round and plastic, others thin and metallic. I cried when a kid broke them during a game of dodgeball during gym in the fifth grade. I’m like a cyborg who relies on glasses to work, and, if you took a sample of one hundred random Americans, sixty-three of them should rely on them too. Back to the gym specimen. I look at his face, and, as usual, there’s nothing resting on his nose. I add to my mental tally. So far, its three positives (two if you exclude me) and eighty-ish negatives.

I know a gym isn’t a truly random sample, but this percentage is insane. It’s an extreme outlier, and when a statistician see’s an outlier of this magnitude, they conclude an external factor must be in play. I’ve thought about this phenomenon for a good amount of time, and no combination of hypotheses I propose work. Some people might be wearing contacts, some might keep it off while they work out, and some might have eaten a surplus of vitamin-A rich carrots. It doesn’t matter. Take off ten percent for each of these cases of the 63.7% we should statistically see. That’s 33.7%, an enormous gap from the observed 4%. No number of additional hypotheses can bridge this gap. When a tally is added to the negatives, I now come closer to a harsh, scientific conclusion. I’m the outlier in this gym.

I started going to the gym as an overweight, near-obese Indian. I knew the gym would be filled with tiring physical obstacles, but I never accounted for the mental ones as well. Fitness has its own dictionary I had to learn. I didn’t know what people meant by “working in.” How many “reps” were in a “set?” What was a “cut?” I still don’t get why people don’t just call it “eat less than usual.” Each exercise required its own manual as well. Even a simple bicep curl requires me to read a list of precautions and rules to ensure I didn’t permanently injury my arm or shoulder. I probably would’ve quit if I had to read the novel of instructions a barbell squat required any earlier than I did.

I was not only just an outlier, but also an outsider. Everyone sported a short buzz cut, and I had hair that needed an appointment with a barber. Tank tops were the preferred article of clothing, but my chest fat refused to wear one. More noticeably, there was no one who had the same, brown skin color, nor a single person who had origins from the same continent. I couldn’t find someone to latch onto, someone I could look to as a potential goal that a person like me could achieve.

Fortunately, I resolved, or grew numb, to these issues. I am now a normal weight, slightly muscular Indian, and I’m proud of the progress I have achieved. Still, I wonder how these things effects people with backgrounds like me. Would there be more South Asians at the gym if, when they looked up a tutorial on how to do a chest press, there was someone brown explaining it? I don’t really know. I just hope that, as time passes, I’ll see a steady uptick in the amount of glasses sightings at the benches near me.