Modern Fitness: The Pterodactyl Method
As often happens, technology advances in lockstep with our own personal goals.
In the middle of the last century the individual who determined to stop slacking and get back into shape directed himself to a YMCA, where he could lift iron weights each individually cast in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, or perform situps and pushups until nausea took over, or take herself to the local high school track and set the goal of making her way one lap around, then two, and so on.
This we might think of as The Neolithic Age of Fitness. The people involved were recognizably human and belonged no doubt to the Homo Sapiens graduating class of that year, but their concerns and methods were so foreign to modern ways of thinking that all the observer could do was sit back and wonder at how far the species had come in the meantime.
Tennis shoes for running? Weights on a barbell for lifting? Pullups from a horizontal bar wedged in the upper doorway? Who can fathom the primitive mind?
‘Now this is more like it,’ that same observer might say as the decades rolled past and fitness expanded out of the jock class and into the larger population.
In watching a celebrity on TV in a colorful top and tights lead a cohort of ordinary citizens also in colorful tops and tights, and performing fitness drills in unison, we started to move into the modern era.
At the back half of that intermediary period and edging into these very days right here, the category of fitness nuttus emerged, like the pinnacle of a long evolutionary process.
These fine people don’t just engage in fitness activity, they live for it. It is their favorite thing. Their body fat index is in the negative numbers, and you get the feeling that if you took away all their bones they would still be able to operate just fine using their muscle system alone. Their ability to take in and use oxygen is such that they are candidates for simply stepping out of the space capsule onto the surface of the moon without a suit and start bounding around. No sweat.
Here’s where the whole technology dealeo comes in, for at least according to the TV ads, these people exercise alone, engaging with an instructor via real-time video transmission, perhaps bathed in SurroundoSense virtual reality stimuli, looking at a screen and responding to the class leader’s remotely-generated encouragement, as, apparently, are any number of participants at the same time from all over the world.
In a particular nod to the aging Boomers sensibilities, the individual is via technology given the impression of riding through the streets of Paris at dawn, or the floor of The Grand Canyon at dusk, or climbing up the streets of San Francisco on her bike. This is pleasing to the eye and presumably also takes the rider’s mind off the demands of the exercise proper.
These fine people are right to recognize that in the throes of exercise you will take all the stimulation, and as it turns out, simulation that you can get. The designers of these programs have accurately tuned into the underlying motivations that get the average human up and going, and gives him juice to execute a meaningful workout.
Well, most of the motivations.
Well, in fact, they’ve identified maybe ten per cent of the things that actually motivate man at his basic levels.
The desire to achieve, to excel, to belong, to ranks yourself among your peers, to follow a strong leader, they are all there.
Nice! Perfectly nice!
These however are the Little League of human motivation. They rank in the Goody Two Shoes category.
What about fear?
It is to be presumed that soon enough planting electrodes into your brain before you climb on the bike will be a natural step in identifying your most basic motivations.
Those electrodes will provide a picture of your innermost, even irrational fears.
You may for instance be riding along, coasting in your mind on a flat stretch of the streets of lovely Vienna and according to the images on the screen, admiring the cafes and the rich cultural life on all sides when, look over there, there’s Coach Magruder.
Nothing could be more foreign to the notion of sophisticated cultural appreciation than Coach Magruder. He is a kind of one person civilization destroyer.
To a degree, he sucks the stuff out of the atmosphere just walking around; when he puts his mind to it he takes society back to at least The Dark Ages.
When I tell you that Coach Magruder was known as Mad Dog Magruder, and that this was the name given to him at birth by his astonished parents, I have told you a lot of how this gentleman comes off in the company of others.
For entertainment he chews empty beer bottles and spits the fragments out, on weekends he wrestles with wolves.
And for some reason or other, he had been chosen by your high school to coach football or track or basketball or cross country or some other damn sport which gives lots of time and space for local madmen like him to implement their particular form of training.
This training consists largely of throwing yourselves into one another at full speed while he eggs you on until one or another of you lies supine on the field and he says, “good hit.”
And this is in cross country. Imagine what he is like on the football practice field!
And so, at his appearance, your heart, which till now you would have sworn was tripping along at an acceptable rate of exertion, suddenly kicks into a higher gear. He’s heading over your way! Now he’s running alongside you! “Get back here!” he shouts, “and give me some pushups. Let’s say an even million!”
Now you are working! Now you have achieved a high level indeed on your personal exertion chart!
Well, these charts are always open to revision, are they not?
For now, as Mad Dog McGruder fades in the distance – at last! – a new danger presents itself, this one airborne, sending the rustle of wind right alongside your face.
It is impossible at first to perfectly identify this new threat, but rest assured it has been stirred up from the deepest recesses of your primitive mind.
Are they – can it be? – are they the wicked monkeys from The Wizard of Oz? Yes, yes, I think they are!
But they are not alone, for flying alongside and among them are out-and-out pterodactyls, drawn with scary accuracy from a once favorite and then feared book of your youth, The Monsters Who’d Like to Eat You. You haven’t made a study of the subject but by all indications these creatures are hungry and have identified you as the entree for the night.
Before we get too far, what kind of person writes a book like that anyway? These days you’d probably get pulled before a judge if you tried to publish that, but back in your youth they were writing all sorts of things with titles like Primitive Rituals and Savage Nature and putting them on the children’s shelf at the library. Good God, is it any wonder that we ended up so wacked-out?
Speaking of those books, and as the hurried rustle of leathery wings of either the evil monkey or the pterodactyl variety fills your ears, lookee here, here’s an open pit you almost rode right into! There’s a double page illustration of just such a pit in one of those books, perhaps Interesting Ways to Die, and here it is, except now in technicolor and who’s to say, Smellovision.
As you skid along the perimeter you look down into the depths and see a forest of upwards-pointing spikes at the bottom, their points dripping with what is no doubt an excruciating poison. You have never fancied going out that way, and look how close you came!
Speaking of close, a dollop of hot lava has landed in your path, and as it turns out, it is one of many such dollops that are now raining down. Turns out there’s a big old volcano over there on the left and wouldn’t you know it, it has chosen now, just as you ride by, to erupt. Not your lucky day.
You have been told by the instructor whose voice has now dropped a full 24 octaves and who apparently, by the way, has now turned into some sort of demon flicking a whip right your way with flames coming out of its tip, that you are to consider what exactly your absolute maximum level of exertion is and then to label it 10.
Well, as it turns out you’re at about 17 on that chart right now, as all these primitive fears get brought to the surface and then given life on the screen and in the virtual reality show going on around you to either side.
You cannot believe that it can get much worse, but, you know, you should never really say that, that whole ‘it can’t get any worse’ business, because, lookee there, there’s your first wife. Never much of a cook, she somehow now has gotten her hands on a rolling pin and, stepping out of the on-deck circle, is shaking it energetically in your direction and coming at you with impressive speed.
“Now, now, honey, let’s just talk about it,” you gasp as you hear the swish of the rolling pin sweep past your temple, but she is intent on making her point, that was always her way, and is winding up for her next at-bat, when you notice out of the corner of your eye…
Well, what don’t you notice?
There is that evil clown with the knife, haven’t seen him for a while, and that one boss who handed you the powerpoint slides and pushed you out onto the stage knowing absolutely nothing about the topic, the depthless spillway at the local lake that you now apparently are hurtling down, a glowering hangman from the Middle Ages, oh, just lots of stuff. Lots of stuff. You wouldn’t have thought you had some much fear-inducing crap submerged below the level of consciousness, but you do, boy, you do.
At the end of the ride you more or less slide off the saddle and lay in a heap on the floor, or perhaps a puddle is a better way to put it, and consider that yes, that was quite a workout, and yet for now you think you will stick with the streets of Paris at dawn, but please hold, you will tell the instructor, please hold the madman clowns and the pterodactyls looking for a snack to tide them over the quiet hours of the afternoon until suppertime proper arrives. You can’t survive being this fit for long.
