I really welcomed moving into the condo after my divorce. The divorce put me through a lot of mental anguish and coming home at night and not ever having to worry about things like cutting grass or raking leaves was a welcome luxury in my life. It still is a welcome luxury three years after. The condominium complex I found has a swimming pool, tennis and basketball courts. Next to the pool is a clubhouse that contains the changing rooms for the pool, a full-featured gym and a main room with a sofa, fireplace and a Ping-Pong table. There is also a small kitchen area with a refrigerator and stove located right off of the main room. The gym with its treadmills, Universal weight lifting machine and large variety of weight lifting equipment including a bench press power station, also known as a Smith machine, was particularly welcome by me. During the time I was married I had started to neglect my body, as most married guys do, and now that I was single again I made it a point to get back in shape and regain my thin, yet muscular physique that I was once so proud of.

I started working out with a neighbor of mine who was once a competitive body builder. He was an invaluable source of fitness information. Anything you wanted to know about exercise, he seemed to know it. Since it was years since I did any real exercise, I welcomed his advice. After a couple of months working out with him, I really started to see significant gains. Since I was single again, I was very happy about this. Even if my newly muscled physique didn’t always impress all the women, it at least gave me the confidence I needed to get back into the dating scene full force.

My new job started to keep me late as the workload increased. As a result I ended up exercising alone, as my workout partner preferred to do his workouts no later than seven at night, as he was one of those people who went to bed by nine and woke up with the sunrise. I was just getting home by seven, sometimes even later, so it was not unusual for me to still be in the gym when it closed at nine.

Considering that there were four hundred units in my condominium complex, there were surprisingly few people who actually used the gym. Maybe they all came during the day, but I know it was unusual for me to even see another person there when I went over at seven or eight in the evening. So, it was a definite surprise when a very slender, athletic looking girl started using the gym at night, around the same time of day as me. She was the type of girl I probably would not have even given a second glance to had I seen her on the street. She was not what I would consider beautiful. She was in fact rather plain, but she had a very lean, athletic build without being overly muscular as some very athletic women can get. She would often be there when I showed up, usually on the treadmill, swinging dumbbells in her hands energetically as she ran on the treadmill at a fairly rapid pace.