While I was staying at the Omni Grove Park Inn and Spa in Asheville, I made sure to exercise the first two mornings I was there. One of the perks of this fitness complex is that it offers group fitness classes, which I haven’t taken at all since 2017, when we moved into our current building with a gym facility. The classes are folded into the “resort fee” we pay to stay at the hotel. The fitness complex is so big and extensive that it actually allows for external, non-hotel guests to pay for membership, so many of the people who go to this fitness center are actually not hotel guests. I signed up for a 90-minute flow yoga class and a 60-minute body sculpt class.
Since they are group fitness classes, they are meant to match the fitness levels of everyone, so both were a lot slower moving than I am used to. Plus, I could see from the clientele that most skewed much older than me. Most of the people in the classes looked like retirees. At minimum, there was a ten-year age gap, with them being older. Although it was slower, it was luxurious in yoga class to hold poses for longer. It also felt nice to have a group to sweat with again. There’s definitely an energy you get when you exercise with others that doesn’t always exist when you are exercising solo.
A few of the members came up to introduce themselves after the body sculpt class on Friday. They asked if I was a guest at the inn (of course, it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t a local since everyone else was White and at least 10-20+ years older than me!). Many of them lived within a 5-10 minute drive from the inn/fitness complex, and they had moved from areas like the Tri-State area and California. They were looking to slow down, have a more relaxed life, and not deal with as much daily traffic.
“The traffic has definitely picked up here in Asheville since more people have discovered it and are moving here,” one of the transplants said to me. “But when people complain that there’s a lot of traffic, that usually means their commute has increased from 9 minutes to 12!”
Even if I couldn’t work out and sweat with my friends, it felt good to change it up and sweat with some very friendly retirees during these classes!