A reasonably amusing story about a 24-hour fitness club in New York City.

Some excerpts from the NYT story:

The value of spending a full day inside a gym is that it gives one the opportunity to survey a rich gallery of human types: the male gymbots with their proud bosoms and stick legs, the flesh mountains, the solitary ponytailed hippie who passes hours leisurely pedaling a recumbent bike while meandering through "Within a Budding Grove," the aging rockers with taut bodies and faces like Salvador Dalí clocks, the young men and women — New York University students, at a guess — in the first flush of adulthood, their flesh firm, their carriages still limber because the ravages of serial hangover, student loan terror and mortgage payments for closet size co-ops have not yet made inroads on their faces and physiques.

There are the ramen-thin fashion models, perennially in the company of a personal trainer, a kind of duenna always struggling to spark tiny model brains long enough for them to hoist toy weights and pump out a few effortful curls. There are the Hells Angels with necks as thick as oak stumps, useful for accommodating Gothic-lettered Harley tattoos.

The corporate koan at Crunch Fitness has long been "No Judgments," a philosophy that in one sense is accurate (all these disparate types actually do seem to get along) and in another is a quaint delusion. The reality is that no one, Hells Angel included, who crosses the threshold of a gym has not at some time been tried and probably convicted in the bathroom mirror by his own private kangaroo court.

Clearly it is no longer just women who are plagued with body-image paranoia. If the widely trumpeted feminization of men has demonstrated anything, it is that the world is now a place where all are free to obsess about belly bumps, crepey knees or the cruel Newtonian joke that gravity eventually makes of everyone's aging rump. ...

At any given moment at Crunch, as I found, one is likely to stumble across a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist drenched in sweat during Matt Pestorius's 6:45 Spinning class or a hedge fund Master of the Universe prancing happily to Marc Santa Maria's hip-hop mixed tapes in a Crumpin' & Clownin' class or a prime-time television hunk, walking half-naked to the showers, a sight that must be related to a recent strict ban on cellphones (with their pesky cameras) in the locker room.

The sense that, in the gym at least, all people are the same person owes something to the anonymous universality of droopy shorts and sweat-stained T-shirts. And that, too, is another great thing about gym culture: despite the best efforts of Polo or Dolce & Gabbana, fashion has never yet found a way in.

"What I love about coming here is that it's like my living room and the people who come here are like my little crowd whether I know them or not," said Joshua Suzanne, a downtown store owner who spends two hours, five days a week at Crunch before heading to her vintage clothing shop Rags-a-GoGo. With her sailor tattoos, lip piercing, bleached sideburns and lovingly coiffed Mohawk, Ms. Suzanne may not be the most obvious exponent of the gym as a laboratory of Platonic ideals.

But there she was last week, exercising her philosophy between sets of pull-ups and arm curls.

"All of us are in here going through our changes, getting fat or skinny, getting nose jobs or boob jobs, getting muscles or not, changing our bodies or not, and it's all, like, kind of abstract," Ms. Suzanne said. "But what's cool is that there's this larger thing going on, where everybody is working toward a better self."

Whether the ideal is remotely attainable matters less, Ms. Suzanne said, than the pursuit. "The dream is what counts," she said. "If you pay attention, you can watch how the physical changes translate in people's psyches. We're all in here. We keep coming back. For some reason or other, we believe."