So I’m Working Out Now. Which Sucks.

I don’t want to say I failed at eating well. Not wholly, anyway. A lot of the basics in my diet have changed for the better. There’s wheat in place of white, I eat fruit every now and again, and Coke Zero is on tap in my living room. Whether I am eating as well as Richard Simmons or not I have now been forced to face the other side of the “healthy lifestyle” coin. I’ve been working out.

I have been to the YMCA each of the last three days, the only three consecutive days I have worked out in my entire life. I have had more consecutive days watching Quigley Down Under.

I’ve said it before but it is not something I feel I can overstate. I hate working out. I hate it. Every gym I have ever been in makes me feel like a hamster on a wheel. Where you going? I don’t know, but my legs sure are moving a lot! My dog would have had the sense not to run in place for a half hour. Of course, there are the free weights. I get these, in principle, but I hate them, too. I think it is because I hate moving. Lugging my boxes and crap from one place to a truck and then from a truck into another place. Lifting weights seems like moving someone else’s stuff but never finishing. I suspect there is a punishment in Hell that works the same way (your Hitlers and Stalins and Maos eternally moving a hide-a-bed upstairs through a doorway, your pederasts and drug dealers maybe lugging boxes of books…. Had Dante known about the Y the gym would be somewhere between Sisyphus and that three headed doberman).

Then there are the machines. The resistance machines, the stair-master!, the elliptical machine, the rack, the bike, the iron maiden…. In general I like machines. They make so many things easier. Cranes lift stuff, bulldozers push stuff, go-karts go in circles, stereo systems play Metallica. All of these things are made easier by machines. Stuff moving, head banging, going in circles – where would we be without mighty machines? Thus I am very comfortable with the idea that I may be crushed by an iron girder, accidentally ground into sirloin by a runaway bulldozer, or made def my listening to Master of Puppets a little too loudly. No matter what I do I can’t wrap my head around the senseless death offered by the machines at the gym.

Ever run on a treadmill and accidentally half-step off the conveyor and on to the rigid plastic? If you have you are lucky you weren’t sling-shot across the floor into the bulky beefcakes preening in front of the mirrors. Ever been on one of those recumbent bike when the seat slides back or forward on you? My LCL almost snapped which would have killed the woman next to me. And the elliptical… this looks like a machine from the future envisioned by hack sci-fi film makers in the sixties. Heaven help you if you fall into those spiraling death footbeds. To me the elliptical machine looks like a high-wire above a threshing machine.

And the sweat. I thought I produced a lot of sweat, but the guy before me always appears to have been melting. Left for my convenience on the seat, the handles, in pools along the base of the control panel…. If I am going to slip on a liquid and fall breaking my pelvis I hope the liquid is from a melting fudgicle and not runoff from a sopping gorilla.

But I’ve been going to the gym for two reasons, one more inspiring than the other.

One, it balances out my inability to eat well all the time.

(One-point-five, I kind of have to. I could re-title this blog “my wife makes me work out.”)

And two, and this is the big one, they have cable TV on the machines. Something like seventy channels. In the last three days I have watched SportsCenter, part of a Yankees game, the exciting fourth quarter of a college football game, and more than my annual quotient of Dog The Bounty Hunter. I am checking the listings for Knight Rider. I’m a Hasselhoff marathon away from conditioning for an Iron Man.

We don’t have cable in our house but the treadmills at the Y have it. Even though it makes me feel like a little fish that follows the light only to realize too late that the light is dangling before the jaws of some prehistoric predator, I find this enticing and cool. I may end up mutilated in some freak elliptical machine incident, but my last glimpse of the world will be Monday Night RAW (which is probably better programming than you get before the iron girder pounds you into the sidewalk).

On the recommendation of a friend I will soon try watching TV at the gym while snacking and not working out. I see myself in bunny slippers (note to self – buy bunny slippers), robe open, bag of Bugles in one hand, Dr. Pepper in the other.

Maybe I could get into working out after all.