No one tells you how to behave in a residential college gym. There’s no orientation module, no laminated code of conduct, no roving FroCo reminding you not to curl in the squat rack. You just descend into the fluorescent-lit underworld and hope you don’t do something socially irredeemable with a medicine ball.
This guide is not about form. It’s about formality. Not how to lift, but how not to look lost while lifting. The unspoken norms. The silent standoffs. The delicate diplomacy of sharing one treadmill with the same guy who watches The Bear at full volume while deadlifting. I’ve made the mistakes so you don’t have to.
Let’s begin in the basement—where all good college gyms are hidden, presumably so no one stumbles in by accident. The Ezra Stiles–Morse gym (or ESM, if you’re trying to make it sound like a co-working space) is technically shared, but I call it the Morse gym. It’s on our side of the building anyway. You enter through an orange hallway, descend under a ceiling that feels roughly four inches from your head, and arrive just past the bathrooms—a positioning that feels cosmically aligned with the aftermath of a hard treadmill run.
If you’ve never been inside, imagine a Cold War-era submarine redesigned as a vaguely Scandinavian rec center. That’s Eero Saarinen for you—angular, brutal, aggressively concrete. Morse and Stiles were designed to be identical and yet remain eternal rivals, like estranged twins in an experimental architecture novel. You share a courtyard but not a soul. Your ceilings don’t match. Neither do your identities. So yes, it’s a shared gym. But don’t tell that to a Morse student jogging past a Stiles banner. We know who this gym really belongs to.
Anyway, the gym is orange. That’s the vibe. Orange rubber floors. Orange sheen on the dumbbells. Orange-tinted aura of mild confusion and deferred maintenance. There’s one elliptical, a rack of kettlebells, a few yoga mats that have seen some things, and—most importantly—a row of treadmills that might as well have my name etched into the side.
Because I am a runner. A distance runner. And I’ve worn those treadmills down like a path in the woods. They’re my second home. I’ve spent many a late night procrastinating an essay by sprinting through the Meghan Trainor Timeless Tour set list or jogging through a quiet sadness accompanied by Catholic mass hymns to feel reverent. Sometimes I run angry, sometimes I run prayerfully, and sometimes I just run because I don’t know what else to do with my body. The Morse treadmills have seen it all. They do not judge. They simply hum.
So, when I talk about etiquette, I’m talking about treadmill etiquette. The sacred rules of the cardio lane. And yes—there are rules.
Rule #1: Treadmill claiming is a legally binding act.
If I place my water bottle on a treadmill and walk away to stretch, that treadmill is no longer public property. It has entered a state of protective custody. You are not to touch it, occupy it, or so much as glance longingly in its direction. If you do, you are entering a high-stakes social negotiation that neither of us is emotionally prepared for.
Rule #2: Respect the run.
Don’t hover. Don’t stand directly behind me while I’m sprinting to a breakup playlist from 2015. Don’t interrupt to ask how many minutes I have left. I don’t know. The treadmill doesn’t know. God doesn’t know. I will be here until I feel whole again or until the 60-minute auto shutoff kicks in, whichever comes first.
Rule #3: Use the squat rack responsibly—if at all.
This one is more of a public service announcement than a personal crusade. I don’t touch the squat rack. I admire it from afar, like a medieval relic. But if you do use it, please be efficient. Do not perform your entire personality in the squat rack while the rest of us tiptoe around the dumbbells like we’re in an ergonomic hostage situation.
Rule #4: No eye contact during core.
The mat area is not a social zone. It is a space of personal reckoning. When someone is mid-plank, they are at their most spiritually and physically vulnerable. If you lock eyes with them during a sit-up, one of you is going to have to transfer colleges.
Rule #5: Wipe down everything, even if you didn’t sweat.
It’s not about sanitation. It’s about signaling. You could be bone-dry and still ceremonially pat the treadmill screen with a paper towel. That tells the next person: “I know the rules. I’m one of you.”
Rule #6: Pretend not to notice.
The guy blasting EDM with no headphones? The girl taking mirror selfies between every set? The moment you almost flew off the treadmill because you got distracted by a Yale Alerts text? You saw nothing. Gym amnesty is the highest virtue.
Rule #7: No one here is actually doing it right.
Every single person in this gym, no matter how confident they look, is just improvising. The guy lifting with perfect posture? He probably watched one form tutorial on YouTube and hoped for the best. The girl with the pristine Lululemon fit and color-coded water bottle? She’s trying to remember how to breathe mid-lunge. The runner racking up miles to Meghan Trainor or Gregorian chant? Don’t worry about him. We are all guessing.
And if you forget the rules? It’s okay. No one’s keeping score. This isn’t about protocol—it’s about trying. The gym is just one of the many places where college students go to hold it together. To procrastinate, to decompress, to feel like they’re doing something when everything else feels too much. It’s not that deep. Really.
So be kind. Be vaguely hygienic. Try not to stare. But don’t take it all too seriously. If you show up, move your body, and make it out without tripping over a foam roller, you’re already doing great. Gym culture is weird. The lights are too bright. The vibes are too ambiguous. And yet we keep showing up. We run in place until our heads clear, or at least until the treadmill shuts off and we remember we have homework.
And then, drenched in sweat and surrounded by the faint smell of rubber and regret, we walk upstairs—out of the basement, back into the world—pretending we were never down there at all.
