A friend just wants to know how what you think of his essay. He is applying ED to CMC and is trying to get any last minute suggestions for improvement.
I am on the treadmill to do penance because I have committed the cardinal sin of growing fat. I have discovered the limitations of the human body and what happens when you dont take care of it. My trainer presses a button and bumps up my speed to 8 kph. Its not a fast trot anymore; its become a sprint, a race for dear life. I half-stumble and manage to stay on, gasping and throwing dagger looks at him.
Im coming up to the fifteen-minute mark. Halfway. The sweat is poring off me in rivulets, and my tongue is hanging down to my chest. He presses another button and adds five degrees of inclination to my invisible hill. I could kill him right now if I wasnt running so hard.
I hate these machines. I hate it that I find myself ruefully contemplating the current state of my life, chewing on the fact that Ive been sentenced to hard labor on this hunk of metal and moving fabric. I think this type of ruminating is best done over dinner with a couple of close friends, not running frantically up a hill that doesnt exist while a slavemaster in sweatpants cracks his whip and watches you like a hawk. Oh, to be somewhere else.
Ive noticed strange behavior here as well. People cast surreptitious sidelong glances at one anothers treadmill stats on the LED consoles, the ones showing how long youve been running, at what speed, and at how much of an incline. Or looking at the amount of weight youre leg-pressing, or how sweaty youve become. Or if youre wearing the latest Nikes. Comparing ones self to people around you in an internal monologue is the favorite pastime in the Jungle Gym: Is he pulling a harder load? Is she running faster and longer than me? God, hes almost vertical on that treadmill; wont he fall off? Im such a wuss, even that old fart with white hair and jowls can run the jogging pants off of me. Ooh, hes bench-pressing a small elephant. What a wimp, giving up after five minutes keep running, Wimp! And lay off the iced tea!
And so on.
Finally, I am through with my routine. Half-dead, but I managed it. Ive crested the invisible hill and crawled down to the mythical, theoretical other side. And then my taskmaster smugly tells me to rest up, because Im heading off to the resistance machines for an hour of weights. So I run. Away. I will eventually return and finish the damned routine, drawn by some sense of responsibility, but first I wander around.
Walking inside the Jungle Gym, away from the machines, I find a large clearing with a smooth wooden floor and a mirror wall. Here the natives come together at certain times of the day for some frantic, ritual dancing, also known as yoga. I am disqualified from these because I have two left feet. So I decide to end my torture session.
I sit drying off in a comfortable armchair in front of a widescreen TV. I sit here debating to myself about what to do next. I think Ill take a shower at home, then eat a heap of cheeseburgers and a huge greasy pile of fries and wash it all down with a couple of big root beer floats. And then Ill take a long nap and not dream of running up an invisible hill.