exercise

I’m sure when ever you think of me, and I trust that you do often, you picture a man of middling years whose most obvious distinguishing physical feature (aside from good looks) is his godlike physique. Fair enough. A decade of hard work in the weight room when I was in my 20s, combined with several more years of vigorous crosstraining has generated a body that brings gasps of admiration from passersby and unsolicited letters of devotion from members of the opposite sex.

About a year ago or so, however, my demanding program of physical fitness was compromised by a nagging pain in a rather unpleasant area. I went to the doctor, actually several doctors, who each in turn suggested some bacterial or viral infection of a particularly male internal organ. The drugs they gave me to fix the problem gave me rashes and did nothing to alleviate the pain. When the last doctor, a urologist, suggested inserting a special scope into a part of my anatomy that I habitually call the Old General, I panicked. The device in question was, as far as I could tell, salvaged off a WWII U-Boat, required two strong men to hold in place, and was designed to rotate upon insertion. I booked out of there and got another opinion. Guess what? It was not an organ problem at all, but a simple muscle pull acquired, no doubt, during one of my heavy weight sessions when I was squatting 700 lbs. I laid off the squats and lunges and was soon fit as a fiddle.

A bass fiddle. I had attempted to compensate for the lack of exercise enforced by my injury with a rigorous program of what I like to call "power eating." This is a particularly Lithuanian approach to fitness which postulates that if you eat enough sour cream, beer, and sausage at a sufficiently rapid rate, you will actually lose weight and gain muscle tone. Most devotees of this school of thought, it must be admitted, see little in the way of tangible results for the first twenty or thirty years of practice but that is because they are insufficiently rigorous in following the program. After a couple of years they break down, order a salad, and the whole process has to be started from scratch. Thank god I am a disciplined man.

Now, as satisfied as I was with this program, and despite the fact that I could look forward to a physique as awesome as my Uncle Danny’s by the time I was 65, I did notice that certain articles of clothing, especially underclothing, were no longer fitting with their usual comfortable looseness. Truth be told, when I put on a pair of briefs I looked less like an Olympic swimmer in his Speedo than a jelly donut with a pipe clamp around it.

Now, through all of this my wife, the beautiful and fit Karen, had been going to a variety of different exercises classes at the local recreation centre. She told me I should ease back into shape with her. She introduced me to a variety of interesting exercise programs. The first was Ashtanga Yoga. She argued that I need to get more flexible.

Why? I mean, how often do you really have to touch your toes in a week? Put your shoes on Monday morning, take them off Friday night -- that’s twice. And when was the last time it was imperative you do a backbend? In fact, when was the last time you bothered to bend over and pick up a coin that was less than $2? Flexible is for invertebrates. I have a spine, thank you, but to humour her I gave it a shot.

Now, Ashtanga Yoga is not to be confused with plain old yoga. The latter involves folding yourself into a convoluted and unnatural pose which you then hold until all the feeling leaves your limbs and you are simply too numb to register the intense pain. With Ashtanga Yoga you fold yourself into a convoluted and unnatural pose which you then hold very briefly before going into a MORE convoluted and unnatural pose. This way you never pass into numbness; the pain is constant and shifting. The poses all have names, like Shamalamadingdong, and while I can’t remember them all, I can describe at least one to you. Picture this: you’re standing up, legs straight. Keeping you left leg straight, you lift your right leg up in the air until your right foot is behind your head. With your foot still there, and your left leg still straight, you slowly bend backwards until you can put the palm of your right hand on the floor about a yard behind you. You now turn your head around so you can see the hand on the floor and lift your left leg.

That’s a warm-up stretch.

Not only do you pose, you have to do other things like, well, breath. When we’re doing the yoga Karen is constantly shouting at me, "don’t forget to breath." In fact I haven’t forgotten, I’ve just been too busy gasping and weeping in pain. And everyday ordinary breathing will not do. No sir. You have to "fire breath." What this means is that you breath very deeply through your nose only. Combine this with the exertion and pain of the movements, and you end up looking and sounding like the bull in Bugs Bunny cartoons. Neighbours have knocked on our door in the middle of sessions to complain about the horrible pneumatic noises coming from our house.
And then there’s the question of balance. Most of these poses involve tightrope-artist levels of balance to stop you from falling over and breaking like a dry pretzel. Whenever I’m in the process of falling (which is usually) Karen shouts the yoga balance secret at me: "Lock your bundas!"

Of course. Stupid me. I forgot to lock my bundas. I’ll get on that right away. Yes sir. Locking them bundas. Them bundas are LOCKED.

Now, what the fuck is a bunda? I looked it up in a yoga book. Not a big help. These books are written by people who have spent a lot of time in India drinking water straight from the Ganges. No longer capable of literal thought, these people write in a series of bizarre metaphors that reflect, in my humble opinion, the hallucinatory effects of terminal cholera: "Yoga is the path of light through the blue chakra of stability to the waters of inner harmonic resonance." Of course. Cleared that up. Anyway, as far as I can tell, a bunda is either a) a muscle b) an organ c) an energy source d) a Hindu god with a blue face and eight arms e) a vegetable curry dish. Whatever the case, I don’t have any. I guess I failed to lock them years ago and someone stole them. Perhaps I should xerox up a sign and put it on telephone poles in the neighbourhood:

LOST BUNDAS - Needed for balance and fire breathing. Answers to the name "Paul’s Bundas"" - May resemble a vegetable curry. Reward: good karma.

From yoga we moved to aerobics. Now, I have only once before attended an aerobics class. I left, thoroughly humiliated, after 3 minutes. The demonically chirpy bimbo who ran that class had screeched lines from a porno movie ("That’s it! Harder! Move it to the side! Feel it! Tighten your butt! Four more! Ooh yeah!") over some disco music while moving her limbs in patterns of such complexity and pointlessness that she looked like an epileptic octopus. Karen assured me that the aerobics class she was taking me to would be different: this was Tae-Bo.

You may have seen the TV ads for the Tae-Bo system. Invented by some bald guy with no shoulders (seriously -- his arms emerge from his neck) and the unfortunate name Billy Blanks, it is apparently all the rage in California, that particular gate of hell from which all new forms of physical-fitness torture emerge to plague the world. The word "Tae-Bo" is, by the way, from the Korean meaning "infomercial." The system is, essentially, aerobic kick-boxing. Now, I boxed for a while in university. I was never any good, but I did have one move that no one could get past: I would block punches with my head. My sparring partner would throw a punch at my stomach, I’d drop down and block that sucker with my head. Confused the bejesus out him. And the coach. Anyway, even if I was never a contender, I was able to keep up with the rigorous exercise that the boxers followed. So I figured Tae-Bo would be a breeze.

Of course, I forgot about the small fact that I boxed twenty years ago.

Doubts began to assail me when we entered the gym. Almost everyone else in the class was a woman. Most of them looked happy to be there. Why would anyone be happy before a work-out? You’re going to be in excruciating and humiliating pain for the next hour and you smile? By this logic political prisoners in South American dictatorship "rehabilitation camps" sit around chuckling all day. Slapping each other on the back and snorting with glee before their next interrogation. These women were obviously members of some horrible cult that forced them to wear spandex, get blonde bob haircuts, and sport big horsey smiles.

My doubts grew as soon as I saw the instructor: lean, muscled, flexible–who wants a body like that? No sir; give me stocky and stout any day. I mean, do you want to look like Noah Wyle or a REAL man, say Oliver Reed. or Danny DeVito? Keanu Reeves or Anthony Quinn? Why have "six-pack" abdominals when you can have the whole "beer keg"? I rest my case.

The instructor put on some techno music, and then began to lead us through a series of warm-ups and movements. Now, an interesting thing happens in a class like this. For the first 15 minutes you think to yourself, "Hey, no problem. I thought we were going to have a REAL workout." Then, at the 30 minute mark, you realize that the clock is broken. There’s no way it can only be 30 minutes. It’s got to be more, like, 75 minutes, maybe two hours. At the 45 minute mark you are thinking to yourself, "I can fake a heart attack and get out of here with my dignity intact. True, they’ll take me away in an ambulance and I’ll have to spend the night in the hospital, but I can escape in the night and walk home in a hospital gown." As the class nears the one-hour mark, only two thoughts CAN be formulated: 1) someone has sucked all the oxygen out of this room 2) I have never hated anyone as much as I hate this instructor.

The actual movements we were being led through were an elaborate and strenuous take on that old game of rubbing your stomach while patting your head. That is, you take one simple movement, like throwing a right jab, then combine it with a polka dance step and an alternating knee slap. Just when you get that figured out, the pattern changes in some cruel and unusual way and you’re tripping over yourself and blundering into the people around you once more. I felt more like Frankenstein’s monster, newly emerged from the tank and unable to control the limbs that had been sown on me, than an athlete.

And what about the greatest cruelty of all? The false count? See, when these aerobics gestapo are putting you through your paces, they shout out numbers so you know how many reps you have to do before the next pattern. You’ve all heard them: "..six, seven eight, now kick over your head!" But at the Centre for Pure Evil at which these torturers train, they’re taught the false count; they lead you to the end of the usual number of reps, then maliciously change the number. Something like this: "..six, seven, eight (sadistic pause), eight, seven, six...." The blatant injustice of this tactic, combined with the relentless beat of the music, made me slightly delirious. I found myself chanting under my breath in time with the music "I hate you, I hate you, I want you to die. Die die die."

When the class was finally, finally over, everyone broke into applause. Why? Well I don’t know about the others but I was applauding the fact that I was still alive. I was applauding the fact that I would get to see my children again, that I would once more walk beneath the stars and smell the night flowers, that I could go home and have a beer. I was applauding because just a minute before I had reconciled myself to an unsightly, gasping death, lying flat on my back looking into the gaunt faces of the aerobics cultists whispering "Feel the burn" before I slipped into the darkness.

Karen now wants me to go with her to a "ball class." In these classes you, apparently, lie on a big ball for an hour while doing strange limb movements. Makes sense to me. But I think I’ll substitute the couch for a ball.

Gotta run. Well, walk with slow dignity.