03 Jun 05 Running with the Cardio-Bots

I ran across a truly amazing column in Time this week, called “Running with the Cario-Bots,” by Walter Kirn. He starts off:

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.

Kirn talks about how exercise, when we are young, is instinctively social, yet it, for many, becomes this amazingly solitary and unfun activity as we grow old:

True cardio-bots don’t [...] fudge when they enter their vital statistics [into the cardiovascular exercise machines]. 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.

The entire column is truly worth a read. If you’re a subscriber, here’s a direct link, or, alternatively, it’s on page 78 of the print edition, if you just want to grab it off a newsstand and give it a quick scan.

I’ll be keeping my eye on Kirn. His writing was just very evocative.