Maybe I'm too optimistic about the gym
A week and a half ago, I started going to the gym. Everyday for one hour. The exercise apparently still hasn't sunken in. No bulging calf muscles and my running endurance went from an all time low (10 minutes) to a not so low 15 minutes.
But more importantly, straight back from China, the gym crystallized my renewed impressions of America. Women in tight pants and tops, men in baggy shorts and T-shirts tangle themselves up in monster machines. A large portion bully themselves on the treadmill, staring fixedly, as though for vital moral support, at the glaring flat screen perched atop their buzzing scaffolding.
The American gym is a microcosm of America's worst. Whereas sport brings people together (granted it's around a piece of plastic polymer), gym adherents are alone with the machine (as I am now with my labtop) in their own bubble of self worship. The machine becomes an extension of their ego, the bigger the better. The effect is heightened by a strapped ipod, piping music that inexorably flattens thoughts to the level of the body: building muscle, losing fat.
As I sat on this beach-chair-like contraption, pushing a board attached to 40 pounds of weight with my two legs, I wondered whether there would have been another way to design these machines. At the time I couldn't think of any. Right now, I have this image of one huge massive treadmill, or conversation of treadmills where people would have to face each other and speak while they are running. The present positioning of the treadmill makes conversation uncomfortable. Maybe the machines could be less intimidating. Instead of black, weights could be rainbow colored. The iron frame could itself lose weight to encourage vision and conversation. Maybe the gym would just become one, huge flat gymnasium where people would sweat over exerting their own body weight. Maybe I'm too optimistic.
