My iPod broke right before spring break. Even though I’m a big fan of putting a soundtrack to my life, I don’t usually feel the loss acutely. I’ve mostly learned to live without it.
Still, there is one place where I can’t get over its loss: Yates Field House. Thirty minutes on the exercise bike are brutal when it’s just you and those flashing green dots on the screen.
What I do gain from the broken iPod is some quality time with my own thoughts, or at least however close to a thought you can come when you’re short of breath and you can see the sweat rising out of your forearms. At first, most of those thoughts just center around the growing tightness in your legs and mounting thirst and the whrr-whrr-whrr of the elliptical machines and admiration of the two guys ballsy enough to use the elliptical machines in the sea of girls and do I recognize that one girl from class, I think so, but no, I don’t, she just looks a lot like her.
Then I hit my stride, hopefully by the time those little green numbers start to tell me 8:01, 8:02, 8:03. A little more blood to my brain and I’m thinking real thoughts again but now I don’t know what to think about. I observe the Yates scene, which is a ton of people moving very fast and going nowhere, some with a fluid motion that makes it look like “climbing a stairmaster” is the natural human position, some jerking each side of their body back and forth, heaving their shoulders into each step as the treadmill neutralizes their efforts.
When did people start doing this? Running to get nowhere? People kept themselves from being fat for centuries without needing big gyms. But now we have cars and computers and people don’t move throughout the day. People don’t walk to the market on Sundays. Imagine telling someone from a century ago they should just run around to nowhere for 20 minutes every day. “Why the hell would I do that?” they’d say.
14:07, 14:08, 14:09.
So it’s a reaction. A synthesis, a dialectic! I always hated the dialectic, never saw it at work, but this is it. Sedentary lifestyle and gyms synthesize into maintaining a fitness status quo. Okay, not perfect, but good.
16:02, 16:03, 16:04
Global warming must be the same thing! The same things that made us sedentary, like cars and massive oil consumption, wreck the environment and cause global warming. So there has to be some antithesis, some lifestyle change to offset it. But there hasn’t been, and that’s why global warming is wrecking us.
Then the wind comes out of my sails—or lungs, really—and my legs feel like they’re being compressed from the outside, as if I’m having my blood pressure taken permanently. The thoughts grind to a halt: Global warming … bad … we need to …antithesis … and all my willpower is focused on making those numbers move a little faster. And those two guys are still on the elliptical machine. Damn, they’re working out longer than I am. Wave hi to incoming friend, please do not come talk with me. I have no breath.
There is no more stride to be hit, just the struggle, that final push when all you can do is watch those little green numbers that no longer correspond to a time but a place where the finish is. Then the machine-sweat wipe down, stretch, collect stuff from the locker room and leave.
It all falls into place coming down that steep hill outside. Not just what it would feel like to walk if I were Roy Hibbert, but that I just figured out Hegel’s dialectic, my philosophical great white whale, from on top of a bike that wasn’t going anywhere. And I put together the global warming puzzle in a way that hasn’t stopped seeming right after a couple of days working it over in my mind. All that and I’m sure to look totally hot if I keep working out like this.
One day, I’m going to trek out to wherever you get iPods fixed and bring back the music. It’s necessary. Gym trips can be physically exhausting and I don’t know if my legs can take it—let alone my mind.
