The Short-Lived Joy of Indoor Exercise Equipment

Time definitely goes by slower in a dentist’s chair. I visit the dentist only about once every six months but the time seems to fly in between so it seems like I’m always having to go to the dentist. Yet once I’m there and getting my teeth scraped and cleaned by the dental hygienist, it seems like hours go by before I’m finally out of there. Yet when I look at the clock on my way out, only about a half hour has gone by. I’m thinking that if I get a dentist chair for my living room, I’ll probably live a lot longer - or it will at least seem like it. Maybe there’s a cable channel that features dentistry 24/7 and I can fill my living room with the high-pitched whines of dentist drills. That should really slow down the passage of time.

Speaking of cable, they seem to have a channel for everything these days. Not one, not two but there are now several channels dedicated to watching other people cook things. They never seem to make a mess doing it either as the countertops are always gleaming and the stainless steel is sparkling. It seems I can’t even heat up a can of soup without having to go through half a roll of paper towels afterwards trying to get everything clean again.

There is this really annoying show that my wife likes to watch. It’s called “Extreme Makeover” or something like that. Anyway, each show features some “down on their luck” family that gets their home completely remodeled for free - apparently in exchange for having whatever dignity they had before eviscerated in 60 minutes of manipulative TV (44 minutes when you subtract commercials for various companies bragging about how enlightened they are for sponsoring this show).

Now the premise of the show doesn’t bother me too much but they go way overboard on the melodramatic emotion thing which is so obviously scripted and faked. Without fail, when the family is introduced to their “new home”, the adults burst into tears on cue and sob uncontrollably as sad violin music plays in the background as the kids dash through the house to check out all freebies like all the big screen TVs in every room with Nintendo hookups and the private jacuzzis in the bedrooms (is this really necessary for a poor family that will now struggle more to pay the increased utility and maintenance bills?).

I keep telling my wife this is all an act and it probably took the TV crew three days and about 37 takes to get the “surprise” scene just the way they wanted it. But she insists that this is spontaneous and that this is the reaction anybody would have if they were sent on a free luxury vacation while a large group of people completely remodeled their home for free and stocked it with with brand new appliances and gadgets that even middle class people could never afford. Maybe so, but I told the wife that it would never happen to us because we have to work for a living and thus have to pay for everything ourselves. She thinks I’m mean-spirited by having this cynical opinion but I feel that this show is an appalling insult to the millions of Americans who work hard everyday just to afford a modest home.

I do wonder what becomes of these families once the TV crews pack up their vans and drive away, leaving them to contend with all the bills that their new lifestyle requires. For example, it will cost thousands of dollars a year just to keep up with the maintenance for that in-ground pool that was built for them. Also, how are relations with their extended family and neighbors who must continue to live in their own run-down houses. I would be interested to see somebody do a follow-up story on that.

So I have this globe sitting in my library and on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I start spinning it around, like I’m some kind of god surveying my world. As I was checking it out, I spotted a Canadian province called Nunavut way up there in the Arctic Circle near Greenland. Now I thought I was familiar with all the Canadian provinces like Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and that grassy, prairie looking place that k.d. lang comes from (Alberta? Saskatchewan?) but I don’t think I ever heard of Nunavut!

So I went ahead and Googled it and found out that this province was sort of created in 1999 by splitting off a huge chunk of land (790,000 square miles) from Northwest Territories and handing it to some Indian tribe. Now how come I never heard of that when it happened? I mean it would be kind of like the U.S. handing Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California to Mexico and nobody noticing.

Maybe nobody noticed because hardly anybody lives up there. Only about 32,000 people living in an area the size of western Europe. Yes, you could fit the entire population of Nunavut into Fenway Park and still have enough empty seats to make it seem like the Red Sox were playing the Toronto Blue Jays in an April night game during a sleet storm.

So few people live in Nunavut that their license plate, in the shape of a polar bear, only uses three digits. They also have one of the coldest climates in the world with an average January temperature of -35 degrees (F). Tourist season is between July 7 and July 18 when the average temperature tops 50 degrees (F). Their most famous resident is a professional hockey player - who I’m sure gets a lot of opportunity for outdoor practice. In the spirit of other frigid places like Iceland and Siberia, Nunavut makes the names of their town impossible to pronounce or spell. Kugluktuk, Iqaluit, and Pangnirtung are examples of this linguistic insanity.

Chainsaws are a major pain in the neck - and dangerous too. I had some trees and limbs knocked down in my yard during the winter and now I have to clean the mess up. So out comes the chainsaw and in goes the gas/oil mixture and the bar lubricant and now I have to get the thing started up. Prime, open throttle, yank chain. Repeat. Repeat again. Finally it kicks in but then it stalls. So repeat. Now the engine is flooded so you have to let it sit a while and try again.

About an hour later, I’m finally ready to use the chainsaw for its intended purpose. It cuts through the first few logs like butter. So far, so good. But then it catches a knot or something and dies on me while still in the middle of the cut. There is no way to get the chain out of the wood without getting a handsaw and cutting it free. Now I have to tighten the chain and add more bar oil already. I think I’m going to hire a tree company to do the rest.

Easter falls in the spring, the yearly time of renewal, when the earth renews itself after a long, cold, winter. However, in the Southern hemisphere, Easter actually falls in the fall, with Halloween falling in the spring instead. That must just seem weird.

I wonder why they call hidden messages and special features in software “Easter eggs”. We notice Easter eggs in DVD movies. If you click up in a menu (or to left and right) instead of down, sometimes you get something extra to click on and then you will see a hidden feature like a movie outtake or a special feature of some kind.

When my kids were growing up, I used to give them their own shopping lists when I took them to the grocery store. This served to get them out of my hair for a while and plus it gave them something “important” to do so that they didn’t have time to look for stuff to put in the cart that we didn’t need.

To make it more challenging for them, I would sometimes add something that I knew the store didn’t have. Or I would make up some fictitious product that didn’t even exist. I remember one time writing down for my son to get two “yelps of yahoos” from the produce section along with the six ears of corn and the stalk of celery. Don’t know how I came up with that but my son diligently went in search of them and soon he had the produce worker going to the produce manager to see if they had any “yahoos” in the back and if so, did they have two “yelps” of them?

Now I don’t know if the produce worker really thought that yelps of yahoos existed or if he was just playing along with my little joke, but it didn’t take too long for my kids to grow older and wiser and soon I could not have that kind of fun with them again.

Indoor exercise equipment...why does it seem that the most exercise I ever seem to get from indoor exercise equipment is when I’m moving it in the house or moving it out of the house? Over the years, I’ve had it all. Treadmills, stationary bikes, stair climbers, weight sets and those funny looking machines that make you look like you are rowing a boat down the Charles river. There’s even a Bullworker somewhere up in the attic that I bought out of a magazine ad back in the 1970s (I think it was National Lampoon) when I was 16 years old. I still remember the ad too. It was some cartoon about a 97-lb weakling getting his girl stolen and sand kicked in his face while on the beach. He then orders a Bullworker and before the summer is even over, he shows back up on the beach looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger and get his girl back.

Well at the time, I didn’t have a girl that could be stolen but I went ahead and ordered one anyhow just in case I was able to get a girl I needed to hold on to later. I forget how much it costed me but it took me about 10 weeks to get a money order together to pay for it and then it was an additional 6-8 weeks (for “shipping and handling”) before it even came to my door. Tracking numbers and customer service for mail-order was non-existent in those pre-Internet days so I spent all that time wondering if maybe I got ripped off in some scam when it finally turned up at my doorstep in a long thin box.

I smuggled it up to my bedroom and kept it hidden from my family because I didn’t want them knowing my “secret” when my muscles started ripping out of my clothes. So I carefully read the work-out instructions and began working out with Bullworker day and night. Now the Bullworker is spring-loaded and sounds like mattress springs when I’m working out with it so to the rest of my family, it sounded like I was doing something else entirely in there. So my father started giving me a knowing smirk every now and then when I came out of my room, my sister told me I was going to go blind and I suppose my brother snuck in there to see if I was stashing girly magazines under my mattress or something. As for my mother, well she was just horrified. But I wasn’t giving up my secret, let them think what they will.

Now the Bullworker definitely got me sore but the muscles never came. After several weeks, I finally got sick of it and shoved it into the corner of my bedroom closet along with other things I never really used like a butterfly net, the cheap telescope my uncle gave me one Christmas and the junior golf club set that I used the one and only time I ever went golfing while growing up. I think I was only taken golfing once because it took me about 90 strokes to get the ball in the hole and I ruined my driver because I got so pissed trying to hit that little ball that I flung it into the woods and it hit a tree. I only lasted about six holes when I was told to go wait in the car until everybody else was done.

So like my golfing career, my attempt to transform myself into a hulking he-man ended in abject failure and I continued having books knocked out of my hand in school hallways and having spitballs shot at me in class. Unfortunately, I did not learn the lesson of the Bullworker because I would go on to spend thousands of dollars on exercise equipment in the years ahead that I would get sick of using after only a few weeks.

For some reason, I got suckered into buying a treadmill a few years back on impulse. I was walking through a sporting goods store looking for a pedometer when I saw this gleaming apparatus in the store, with the digital readouts of the mileage (carried out to two decimal points!), your heart rate and about ten other data points, like calories burned and how many years are being added to your life, as well as the “programming” that automatically raises the platform during a workout to simulate running uphill, I decide that I want one. I need one. I must have one if I am going to get healthy and stay that way. Like the Bullworker, I had visions of spending hours a day transforming myself into a world-class athlete.

My wife is looking at the four digit price tag with steam coming out of her ears but I’m busy telling her about all the money we are about to save due to my new, healthy lifestyle. We will save money on food because I’m going to subsist on carrot sticks and bottled water until this treadmill is paid off. Then we’ll save money on clothes because I’ll lose weight and I’ll be able to fit into all those clothes again that I boxed up and put in the attic because I couldn’t button the buttons anymore. Also, I won’t be having that projected heart attack my doctor keeps warning me about after all because I’ll be so healthy now that I’m spending 1-2 hours a night on the treadmill as I watch TV or listen to audiobooks on my iPod (as the salesman is telling me I can do).

So after a little hostile whispering between the wife and I as the salesman writes up the order, and me agreeing to forgo all birthday and Christmas presents for the next five years, we now have to figure out how to get the thing home and put together. It was a bitch getting it into my house and down the basement to the family room. Once that was done and all the necessary adjustments got “dialed in”, I put on the running shorts and New Balance sneakers that I just spent $100 on at Kohls (can’t start a new exercise regime in old sneakers now can you?) and fired up the treadmill for my first workout.

About 45 minutes later, I determine that the treadmill pretty much sucks and now I wish I could just get my money back. It’s nothing like it was in the store. It’s vibrating and making a racket. I can’t hear the TV unless I turn it up loud and when I do so, my wife hollers from upstairs to turn the damn TV down. So I try to listen to my iPod but the earplugs keep falling out of my ear. I then try to read a book but I can’t focus on the words from that far away and besides, all the words are jumping up and down anyway because I’m running - or walking fast. So now I’m bored out of my mind and sweating like a pig.

I spend the next few weeks bravely enduring the treadmill workouts so I do not have to endure the “I told you so” from the wife, but gradually, my sessions are further and further apart. Sometimes I would just let the treadmill run by itself while sitting on the couch reading a book and drinking a beer just so she would think I was down there using it. I guess the sessions really started getting further apart when she took to using the treadmill platform as storage space for laundry.

So now I have this barely used treadmill that’s been sitting in my basement for something like three years now. Nobody wants to buy it because who wants to buy a used treadmill? You know how a new car loses 20% of its value as soon as you drive it off the lot? Well for a treadmill, it apparently loses all its resale value the second you take it home and plug it in. I figure I’m going to have to pay somebody now just to take it away. But sometimes miracles do happen and I found somebody at work who was willing not only to take it away but give me a few bucks for it.

On a Saturday morning, he shows up in a truck to come get it. We disassemble it and now we have to get it up a narrow flights of steps and get it around a tight corner, through my kitchen and out the back door. I’m huffing and puffing, pain is shooting through my legs and back. we finally get it to the driveway and now I have to help him lift the thing into his truck. As he drives away, my heart is pounding through my chest and I feel like I just ran the Boston Marathon. I then realized that I hadn’t had such a strenuous workout since the day I brought that same treadmill into the house three years earlier.

When I watch those housing rehab shows on television, I always wonder how shoddy the work must be to be completed in such a quick and dirty fashion. After all the manipulative emotional nonsense, I bet the house falls apart and the pool leaks and floods the back yard, costing the owners thousands they don’t have to repair the repairs. :)

I then realized that I hadn’t had such a strenuous workout since the day I brought that same treadmill into the house three years earlier.

Kind of reminds me of the saying about the happiest two days of a boat owners life... the day they bought it and the day they sold it.

Another happy customer here!

I loved the part where you sent the kid looking for “yahoos” and the produce guy went to look out back for them.

Also, about the cooking shows, good old Julia Child is the only one I recall ever making a real life mess and laughing and going on with her cooking. I really liked her show.

I have a BowFlex....wanna buy it?

Hee Hee.

It’s great. It’s not boring because you can change exercises almost without end if you want...but still as nice as it is, it sits idle 99.9 % of the time.

My simple stationary bike has gotten the most use over the years, but only because it’s in the TV room.

BowFlex is too big for that room.

Loved the story,,,,hope you can crank out one a week!

Cheers!

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