Raul Ascunce
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic roughly two years ago, most everything shut down: Restaurants, movie theaters, retail stores, churches and gyms.
While I missed all those things, there was one establishment I was not sorry to see shut down — the gym. I paused every morning at 8 to thank my heavenly maker that the gym was closed. At last, I wouldn’t have to make the bitter cold trek to the gym to sweat my tired old buns off on some mechanical device, designed to sculpt me into the pear-shaped Adonis I always have been with or without exercise.
But after a couple of months without physical activity, I was starting to get a real paunch of guilt collecting at my personal equator. And so, I Googled on my laptop, “What device best reduces one’s personal equator?”
The first thing to come up was a padlock for the refrigerator. This was followed by a plethora of weight and aerobic devices that would place a painful strain on my wallet. I shared my findings with the wife for her opinion.
“Oh my,” she said, “there certainly are a lot of choices. The weights are out because they are heavy and I don’t do heavy. So I think we should pick something aerobic. You like an exercise bike and I really love elliptical machines, so I think we should go with an elliptical machine. Glad I could help.”
“Well, I must thank you, dear, for your unbiased opinion. Remind me not to ask you for future unbiased suggestions.”
More research revealed a combination machine that rides like a seatless bike with handlebars that move back and forth for those flabby arm muscles. I like to call it an “ellip-cycle.”
The plan was to use the ellip-cycle for a few months until the gym reopened.
Well, I have to be honest here, it’s a whole lot easier to go down into my basement, in my pajamas if I want, to put in 45 minutes or so on a machine that isn’t a petri dish of infectious diseases left by complete strangers. The only cooties I have to worry about are the wife’s.
And besides, no one criticizes me for putting a Pringles can in the water bottle holder at home. (Oh, the looks I got at the gym.) Well, after two years of use, the ellip-cycle started to squeak and creak.
“Honey,” the wife said, “should you be lubricating some of the joints and gears on the ellip-cycle? It sounds horrible.”
“Really?” I said, “I thought that noise was coming from my knees. OK, I’ll check into it.”
For an entire afternoon I disassembled the ellip-cycle and greased up all moving and non-moving parts. I even put a little extra grease on my knees in case that was part of the problem.
The entire three hours, I was down on my knees on a cold hard concrete floor working on this machine. And when I was done … I couldn’t get up. The knees had locked, I had a cramp in my calf muscle, and my spine had assumed the shape of a question mark as if to ask, “Is all this exercise really worth it? You’re just going to die anyway.”
It’s true what they say, listen to your body. And my body was saying, “What’s wrong with being pear-shaped?” Now I gotta go. I see a can of Pringles with my name on it.
Raul Ascunce is a freelance columnist for the Sentinel-Tribune. He may be contacted at [email protected].
