Running with the Cardio-Bots

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I walk into the gym, and there they are, the cardio-bots, half human, half machine, eyes fixed on banks of televisions and ears glued to iPods as they scale imaginary mountains or jog down simulated country roads. How driven they seem, how profoundly self-conscious. Digital monitors strapped around their biceps register their blood pressures and heart rates as their tissues absorb L-glutamine-laced protein drinks that taste like the sort of thing computers would drink if computers got thirsty. And though there must be 30 cardio-bots, lifting their sinewy thighs in unison as their StairMasters and treadmills tick off the number of calories they've burned, each one of them seems to exist in his or her own universe, oblivious to the rest.

When did working out turn into tuning out? How did the pursuit of physical fitness come to resemble a quest for spiritual numbness?

My earliest memories of recess at grade school begin with teachers setting us loose to swing on monkey bars or climb the jungle gym; exercise was an instinctively social activity. We shoved, we kicked, we jostled, exerting ourselves in rambunctious little packs, only wandering off to be alone when our feelings or bodies were badly hurt. Even when we lined up for jumping jacks, we couldn't help glancing at the kids around us and making funny faces when they glanced back. We discharged our energy freely, chaotically, swapping our high spirits with friends and paying no attention to our pulse or other internal physiological signals.

For me--and for many others, I suspect--the lonely, introverted process of statistically quantifying my strength and stamina levels and comparing them to some abstract norm started a few years later, in fifth grade, when we were called to the playground to compete for the President's physical fitness certificate. The hidden purpose of this cold war--era program was, I presume, to transform the public schools into a vast network of junior boot camps. The criteria for obtaining the certificate were ominously unvarying and exact. If a child couldn't do a certain number of chin-ups or complete the 50-yd. dash in a certain number of seconds, he was failing not only himself but the whole nation.

That was a lot of pressure for a youngster, and I couldn't handle it. After falling short one day in the standing broad jump, I holed up in my bedroom for three hours attempting again and again to hit the mark, which I'd indicated on the floor with a piece of masking tape. Each time I missed, fresh tears welled up. Science had proved my inadequacy, it seemed, and soon the news would reach the President's desk.

This notion that fitness is chiefly a matter of numbers haunts me still and may be the force that pushes the cardio-bots to such extremes of self-absorbed exhaustion. Merely getting into shape is not their goal; they want to break personal records, racking up victories in some private race whose finish line is always receding. The authority figure whipping them along is not a teacher or the Commander in Chief but an overdeveloped sense of shame or pride that seems to fluctuate in direct response to the readouts on their elliptical machines.