A Wall. A Ball. That's All: Your New Social-Distancing Workout

It’s a gray slab surrounded by a chained fence that looks like it might have once been part of a racquetball court. A month ago, the drab-looking wall would have been easily overshadowed by the sleek Equinox or Asphalt Green gyms close by.

But now it has become the belle of the ball. Locals are lining up to have their turn with it.

Christian Jorg, 56, who runs two startup accelerators, gets there at 7 a.m. “There is no system really,” he said. “It’s first come, first served.”

In normal times he would be playing at a tennis club. But now that it’s closed and he’s isolating, which means no tennis partners, he’s playing against the wall.

“I don’t have any other choice,” he said. “But it’s actually fun. The ball comes back to me quickly, so I can do volleys and backhands. It’s also good for concentration.” It’s such good exercise, he said, that he only needs to do it for about 20 minutes.

“Do I prefer playing with a partner? Probably,” said Jorg, who grew up hitting tennis balls against walls in Munich. “But you have to make do for now.”

Zara Chadowitz, 35, a senior program manager at Amazon who lives in Manhattan, refuses to disclose the location of her wall.

She discovered it last week on a grocery run when she saw people playing racquetball against it. She returned a few days later with her tennis racket and a few balls.

“I felt like it was the first day I was sort of winning corona,” she said. “I hadn’t played tennis in so long. I got the exercise, the endorphins. There was a meditative aspect to it.”

She now feels as if she’s part of a secret community. “There was a cute old guy who was throwing a ball against a wall in his surgical gloves, and a basketball guy playing alone in a surgical mask,” she said. “It looks like people are using the wall for whatever they want.”

For Chadowitz, hitting balls against the wall is a nostalgic and comforting experience, as she grew up playing tennis this way in Manchester, England. “My dad built a wall in the garden, and he painted a line across it where the line would be,” she said. “I would make up imaginary games in my head, pretending I was playing friends or my brother.”

Lauren Wire, 31, a publicist who lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has never given much thought to the brick walls that line her building’s courtyard. “I’ve definitely never touched these walls before,” she said.

Now they’re part of her daily routine.

Every day she sets up her yoga mat against one to do exercises she would normally do at CrossFit. Sometimes she does wall-sits and headstands. Other times she focuses on stretching. She even ordered a weighted ball so she can squat, throw it against the wall, catch it and return to a squat.

“Before coronavirus I would have felt awkward doing this in public,” she said. “Now I am putting music on with my sports bra and crushing it.”

Some neighbors even cheer her on when they see her.

Shelly Eichas, 33, a personal trainer and registered dietitian who also lives on the Upper East Side, said she has been amazed by how New Yorkers have incorporated various city objects into their workouts.

“I’ve seen people using statues, stairs, benches,” she said. “I saw somebody the other day in the park using a tree. He was just scaling the tree up and down, up and down. I was pretty impressed.”

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She also understands the draw to the wall and is encouraging her clients to find one to use for resistance in doing burpees or pushups. “I could go on forever about what you can do on a wall,” she said.

Walls are also doing their part to help parents entertain their children. Noah Coslov, 38, a freelance sportscaster, introduced one as a new playmate to his 5-year-old daughter, Eden. Two weeks ago they went to an empty basketball court with tennis balls. There they found a wall not in use. So they summoned their imaginations.

“We probably made up eight different games, throwing the ball against the wall at targets and passing it to one another,” he said. “I certainly won’t forget the memory, and I hope she won’t either.”

He didn’t consider possible infection at the time, he said. “I didn’t even think through the tennis ball touching the wall, and then us touching it.”

But he did come to worry about other people. He said that he and his daughter left the basketball court once another person arrived who wanted her time with the wall.

Some New Yorkers are hooked, they said, and intend to keep playing with their favorite walls, even when the city becomes fully operational.

“I am going to keep doing this,” Chadowitz said. “In New York, it’s hard to get a tennis court, and it’s hard to find someone to play with who is the right level — not too good and not too bad,” she explained.

“With the wall you can go any time you want; you don’t have to book or rely on anyone else,” she said. “I think this is going to be my weekly ritual.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .