Thinking in the hotel gym

  • Greg and I are in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia, get­ting ready for a big trip that ought to result in some good travel blog­ging, I hope. We take off on Wednes­day for Van­cou­ver, and I’ll fill in more later on. But till then we’re just kick­ing back, check­ing in with some fam­ily and friends and try­ing to adjust to the dif­fer­ent time zone. We’re also eat­ing too much, because south­ern Cal­i­for­nia has “oppor­tu­ni­ties” that I can’t resist. (SoCal friends, be pre­pared to cry: Mis­souri doesn’t have any ClaimJumper restau­rants and hardly any Del Taco, only Taco Bell. I know! It’s like liv­ing on the moon or some­thing!) So this morn­ing, I got myself into some floppy clothes and went to the gym. It felt great, and with my mind free to wan­der with a few less press­ing e-mails and trans fats to inter­rupt, I even­tu­ally found a big­ger point out of it all.

    That point could well have been how much I’m miss­ing out by going to the gym in my lit­tle home­town. It’s a friendly place, to be sure, and you’re always likely to take home a lit­tle of the fit­ness instructor’s freely dis­pensed philo­soph­i­cal offer­ings along with your healthy glow, but the machines in that gym are prob­a­bly 20 years old and have the kind of char­ac­ter that can only come from that much mileage. What they don’t have are all the whizbang gad­gets dis­played on the screen of the ellip­ti­cal trainer I climbed onto. The view out the win­dow wasn’t par­tic­u­larly good, so while I started chug­ging away, I slowly vis­ited all the pos­si­ble fea­tures open to me in the pur­suit of my tar­geted workout.

    Once I set­tled on some­thing I could under­stand, I set­tled into my rhythm and tried to just clear my head, but it was a lit­tle hard to do that. There was a TV set on behind me and it drew my atten­tion with such snip­pets as I could make out: “dan­ger­ous” “body tem­per­a­ture” “extremely dan­ger­ous” “40-below-zero”. And then finally an inter­vie­wee bel­low­ing good-naturedly “I think I hit myself with the hatchet!” Of course. It’s another episode of “The Dead­liest Catch,” the doc­u­men­tary show about King Crab fish­ers that asks the musi­cal ques­tion: “Ninety peo­ple a year die acquir­ing Alaskan king crab and the injury rate is 100% — want some extra but­ter with those crab legs?” (My con­science is clear. I don’t like seafood, and the only ones who die for my burger and fries are the cow and any par­tic­u­larly deter­mined fry cook.)

    I try to tune it out by revis­it­ing my machine’s screen and find that I had missed a but­ton: TV on. Yes, I am a child of won­der — the cir­cuit trainer had its own lit­tle built-in TV that I could watch while I work off last night’s debauch­ery. Try­ing to get the hang of channel-flipping with­out los­ing my pace is tricky, but soon I’m watch­ing a news pro­gram with­out the sound on. I sup­pose it’s for occa­sions like this that the kindly news media started the prac­tice of hav­ing things to read at the bot­tom of the screen. This time I’m look­ing at a shaggy-haired guy that looks famil­iar. “Churchill will find out today whether he’s fired” reads the cap­tion. Ohhh, yeah. The Uni­ver­sity of Col­orado pro­fes­sor who wrote an essay in which he called the 9/11 vic­tims “lit­tle Eich­manns.”
    I find that I really don’t need the sound on. There’s archived footage of him walk­ing places, being on stage. They cut to an inter­view with a fac­ulty mem­ber and a lawyer. No doubt they’re coura­geously espous­ing a view­point that the media will love to hear: that a per­son gets to be a total jerk in this coun­try, and if he’s some­one who is doing his best to edu­cate young peo­ple in how to be just as big a jerk as he is, he’s a hero and we should all think that he’s brave and clever, not just mind­lessly provoca­tive, ego­tis­ti­cal and heart­less.
    Time to change the channel.

    On other net­works, we’ve got ads aplenty, but finally I out­last them and make it onto another actual pro­gram while I start to work up a sweat. (Behind me, the episode of “The Dead­liest Catch” has ended and gone directly into another episode. What is it with that show?) I can’t make out much of what’s going on with the pro­gram on my lit­tle screen. We have footage of some town, a cer­tain bar or restau­rant, and some pho­tos of dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Then we have mugshots, a slo-mo perp walk and pho­tos of some­one that looks like a nice person.

    Nope, not watch­ing that, even with the sound down. Espe­cially with the sound down. No crime dra­mas. Seen enough of them. They never change.
    And besides, my time’s up. I get off the cir­cuit trainer and start in on some other machines. Some of them I can’t really fig­ure out, and am only spared the embar­rass­ment and pos­si­ble injury of try­ing to goof around with them by watch­ing other fitness-seekers. As we work our way from machine to machine, some­times we exchange brief greet­ings or a quick smile. When I saw a man reach into a com­part­ment and take out a slightly refrig­er­ated, slightly damp clean towel, I wanted to exchange a major hug. I didn’t know those were there, and that’s some­thing our gym at home def­i­nitely doesn’t have.

    I even­tu­ally felt like I was as healthy as I was going to get with­out drop­ping dead and climbed onto a tread­mill to begin a cool-down. Another com­pli­cated screen, another built-in TV, but this time I leave it off and just walk, which feels good. The view out the win­dow here isn’t any bet­ter than it was from the ellip­ti­cal trainer.
    Since, to my great sur­prise, work­ing out has become part of my rou­tine for a cou­ple years, I’m used to the way this feels. I don’t look in the many mir­rors — way too many mir­rors — that gyms have, but I can feel where I am. When I first start with my work­out, I feel great for a minute or two, and then there’s a period of adjust­ment dur­ing which my body fig­ures out that I’m doing work. For a while after that there’s resis­tance and I might go through a part where I feel tired. But then I get on the other side of it and cross over into the place where I can go the rest of the way. What­ever con­vers­ing and men­tal busy­ness occurred before tends to end here. My fel­low exer­cis­ers aren’t talk­ing to me or I to them — we’ve all been doing this too long now and we’re past that point. We’ve gone inside for a while.

    I look down at my screen for a minute while I start to slow up and bring down the incline. I still don’t have the TV on. No Ward Churchill, no infomer­cials, no crime dra­mas. I’m on the other side of that — I’m past where you think about those things. Because I’ve finally got­ten to the real work of the work-out.

    It occurs to me how obsessed our cul­ture is right now with report­ing on itself, with talk­ing and giv­ing opin­ions and pro­vok­ing opin­ions. We detail crimes and sala­cious cur­rent events over and over, because it seems like there’s just some­thing buried in all this that we HAVE to know, we HAVE to get to the bot­tom of. Things are just going you-know-where in a hand­bas­ket and we’ve GOT to keep tun­ing in and argu­ing about it.

    And up to a point, there may be some value to that, but I won­der if we’ll ever get to the other side of it. Just the same way that in both very good and very bad mar­riages you get beyond the point of talk­ing about your rela­tion­ship, we may find our­selves in that place where the work really begins and we find out whether we have real strength, real grit or only the abil­ity to argue, to gather in infor­ma­tion with­out ever intend­ing to take an action or make a decision.

    Maybe that’s just the kind of thing you won­der on a tread­mill when you’re just about done. Maybe there wasn’t enough blood going to my brain. But it seemed inter­est­ing at the time. So I promised myself I’d get it down in writing.

    Of course, I also promised myself that I would stay away from Del Taco’s crinkle-cut fries today. So we know what tread­mill promises are worth.


    Related posts:

    1. Back here, think­ing about back there
    2. Stand back. I’m thinking
    3. C-SPAN run. Run, SPAN, run.

    May 28th, 2007 | Grace | No Comments |

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