Running with the Cardio-Bots

By Walter Kirn

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.

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. o