Work Out with your Jerk Out

Last night at the gym, I was thwarted in my attempts at calisthenics by a woman wearing bright red lipstick and too-tight shorts. She wasn’t hogging the ellipticals, didn’t chat my ear off while I was trying for a treadmill-induced trance, and chose not to scowl at my frenetic workout pace like other patrons do. Oh, no. Much worse: she commandeered the remote control.

At my small and unassuming gym, there are only two televisions, and a scant one of these faces the general direction of the cardio machines. This TV has typically achieved some sort of stasis by the time I arrive around 7 pm. But last night, one woman embarked on an epic journey to find just the right channel to float her boat. The problem for the rest of us was: she couldn’t find it.

This was no ordinary channel surf. Just when I thought she had settled comfortably into an episode of Scrubs or Hannah Montana, she began her maniacal flipping yet again. For 17 minutes—timed by my elliptical’s ever-handy dashboard—this woman continued to surf through channels like she was on the Association of Surfing Professionals World Tour.

Unfortunately for me, my only hope of sustaining an extended workout session is to bombard myself with every possible kind of mental distraction. An hour at the gym means going on sensory overload. Ideally, I have rap music blasting through my iPod speakers, a superficial magazine in front of me, and a fast-paced program on the TV set (with captions, of course). Only then can I engage in a 600-calorie burn—although it remains to be seen if obsequious Precor and its sycophantic calorie display can really be trusted.

When channels are flashing by at the speed of light, however, achieving the necessary level of distraction is utterly impossible. Luckily, after 17 minutes of a grueling, unmitigated session on my machine, the woman made her final decision. What did she choose? The SciFi Channel.


Now, it’s not that I have anything against the SciFi Channel per se. As a child, I was an unabashed Trekkie, basking in the glories of TNG and secretly crushing on Wesley Crusher. But as an adult sweating my ass off on an unforgiving elliptical, watching grown men marvel over a yeti’s foot just isn’t going to cut it.

It’s not like it’s my first frustration at the gym. Usually when I arrive, the TV is set to Fox News, and inevitably, Sarah Palin is featured prominently in at least one story every 25 minutes. Sarah Palin has an interview! Sarah Palin has a pregnant daughter! Sarah Palin has trendy glasses! Through the din of Jamie Foxx and Kanye crooning “She a golddigga,” I can sometimes hear the women on adjacent ellipticals cooing, “Isn’t she great?”

The result is that I find myself getting viscerally angry as I pump my arms and legs faster and faster and my heart rate spikes to the 194-203 range. At least one thing can be said for Sarah Palin: she’s making me lose weight.

So it was only natural that yesterday evening, I was faced with a life-altering decision. It struck me at the very core of my being, dredged up from years of pandering to two very disparate sides of myself. It could be summed up in one simple question: Sarah Palin, or yeti’s feet?

Trembling slightly, dizzied by the knowledge of what I had to do, I made my choice.

I chose neither.

Instead, I leapt from my machine and made a mad dash for the remote as soon as the offending woman released it from her clutches. I flipped to CNN. I watched a silent John McCain’s captions talk about service.

By the time I returned to my elliptical all of six seconds later, it had reset to “zero.”

Remarkable, isn’t it? How easy it is to halt progress.