Friday, 16 December 2005
12:13 AM
Everyone knows that the advertisements for fitness facilities show people who pretty much don't need to be visiting fitness facilities all the time, sort of the way diet ads show skinny people. When you go to a gym, there is a, shall we say, wider array of body types attendant than you might guess from the promo materials. But there they all are, all those people in all their many shapes, huffing and puffing away, oomph-ing at the machines or climbing the sisyphusian StairMasters, contorting themselves on mats or plodding along on the treadmills.
But even if Joe and Jane Ordinary at the gym are unlikely to appear in the center's slick brochure, at least they're out there turning that extra slice of cheesecake into entropic thermal energy. And even if they're not all, like, buff and stuff, most people seem to have enough coordination and grace to be able to get through a workout. Para bailar La Bamba, se necesita una poca de gracia.
Not me. I have terrible balance. Or more generally, I have a very poor sense of where my physical self is. I had some sessions with a trainer a while back, a woman who among other things teaches yoga. We worked on one of those fitness balls so I could build up my "core." We're all about the core. She had me do this thing where you stretch backward over the ball and touch the floor over your (upside-down) head. She just sort of arched back over the thing to show me. "Now you," she said. And I would roll backward over the ball and … fall off. Like, every time. I tried it at home once and fell off, naturally, and crashed into furniture, which hurt.
But surely the boy can use a treadmill. After all, a body is upright whilst ... uh, treading. When I work out, I wear a t-shirt and some shorts and dorky white socks with my running shoes. So, the other night I got onto the treadmill and had my usual button-pushing-and-beeping conversation with the damn thing, and then began that particular tedious workout. It's boring, really. In fact, so boring that a person can get a little distracted. I did something, I don't know what -- I think I turned my head to look to the side, and …
... Whoops! Something went awry under my feet. There was a squeaky noise, I went a-tumbling, and all of a sudden I was hanging on for dear life, my bare knees bouncing off the relentlessly turning rubber. My instinct, foolish in retrospect, was to flail at the thing with my feet, presumably to try to climb back onto the thing. But it's a little hard to climb onto something that's moving under you at 6.6 mph. Or let's just say that I did not succeed in this effort.
I don't know how long the lower part of my uncoordinated self was merrily ricocheting off the treadmill -- it seemed like a long time, but was probably no more than three or four seconds. Fortunately, the guy at the machine next to me had a clearer head than I, and he reached over and popped the big red STOP button. (Aha, I thought, now I get what that's for.) "Are you all right?" he asked with an expression that conveyed both alarm and, somehow, a certain "WTF was that!?" wariness. My dignity already in shreds, I wasn't going to add to my humiliation by being a big ol' crybaby about it, so of course I breezily said "Sure! Fine!" And I climbed back on and carried on with my joggery precisely as if this sort of thing was perfectly routine. But I was afraid to look down at my shins which, I sensed, were bleeding into my socks.[1]
Later in the locker room I did stop and have a look. Jesus. My knees and shins look like I was dragged facedown behind a car for a block or two, reminiscent of some of the more severe incidents of my childhood. Taking a shower with stinging legs was most unpleasant. And in the last few days, just pulling the pant legs over my knees while getting dressed has been a bit of a delicate operation. Or, hell, just stretching out my legs.
Even so, I went back to the gym tonight for more of the same. This time I wore long-legged workout pants. "For protection or to hide the scabs?" someone asked me. Why, both, of course.
[categories]
personal
|
link
|