Running with the Cardio-Bots

(2 of 2)

What terrible taskmasters those devices are--emotionless drill sergeants that beep and blink instead of hurling obscenities. When I get on an exercise machine and it asks me to punch in my age and weight, I often find myself lying to its computer chips by adding a few years and several pounds. This lowers the resistance and duration of the workout I'm asked to undergo and allows me to feel triumphant when I finish, as though I've exceeded expectations. But whose expectations? The machine's? Why should a human being even care about impressing a thing of metal and plastic?

True cardio-bots don't ask themselves such questions. Nor do they fudge when they enter their vital statistics. Cheating, they realize, will only retard their progress toward that elusive body- fat ratio that they consider optimal--or it will until they reach it, at which point they'll revise it lower. To my eyes, a lot of them would look much better with a little more butter on their dry bones, but mere attractiveness isn't what they're after. Fitting into smaller pants and dresses may have been what brought them to the gym, but it's not what keeps them there, all hopped up on unpalatable supplements and the odor of their own sweat.

What keeps them climbing that staircase to the clouds is, I sometimes think, the utter terror of finally achieving a biological benchmark past which no improvement is necessary. Because then they might have to stop, remove their earphones and look around. Worse, they might have to look within. What they might find, in many cases, are the frightened, fragile egos of people who have been obsessed since fifth grade with proving their worth as physical specimens to themselves, their teachers, their nation's leaders and even the machines they're working out on.

Or maybe that's just what I tell myself when I need an excuse for not going to the gym. •