Through the Children's Gate (34 page)

Y
et beneath the gentle voice and patient rational explanation of the SuperSlow trainer, one senses a hard Protestant rigor: Exercise is exercise, medicinal rather than recreational and absolute rather than open. The old gyms, the Running Fathers realize, were Catholic and Mediterranean in their spirit, a form of genial folk magic tied to a ritual practice. Everyone went, no one truly improved. Exercise from the seventies through the nineties, for a certain class of New Yorkers, was what communion and confession were for Italian peasants—not means but ends, not paths to heaven but the Godhead itself. If you “worked out,” you did not need to succeed at it—in fact, no one
did
succeed at it, really, no one seemed much thinner or stronger or (aside from a few gay men and professional athletes) truly altered. Considering
the total number of hours spent in the gym, one would have expected a city of Samsons, a metropolis of Babe Didriksons. Instead, people went on dieting, and the gym existed as the church does in a Sicilian village, as a gathering place, an intermediate institution, where fitness, like grace, would eventually descend on your head just from being there—and if it didn't, what of it, death was a long way off, and the body, like the Mediterranean God, was forgetful, largely forgiving. They were not running on a track or a path but in a village square, a piazza where people took a morning run in place of morning espresso.

The new slow exercise is a form of Protestantism, and has the Protestant knack of combining a grim view of the meaninglessness of activity with a faith in the necessity of action. Grace is hard to come by, and you may never achieve it. Predestination, in the form of genes, applies nearly everywhere, to every wish and muscle. Yet you do it anyway, because good work, however painful, is your only hope, however faint.

Beyond the trainer's charming and diffident help, the Running Father senses a grim core to the SuperSlow philosophy, a dark Geneva of the heart behind the smiling and helpful Unitarian facade. The Founder of the new slow exercise lives in Florida and performs his rites in some cool large strip mall. Every month or so, he writes a screed, never longer than a few pages, that is distributed, silently but significantly, at the front desk of the workout room.

The Founder has contempt—not gentle condescension but furious, barely contained contempt—for runners and running, aerobics and aerobics classes, disdain for all the manners of the old exercise regimen, which pretended to have a point and were merely recreation. Even the words infuriate him; the concept of aerobics and aerobic exercise he treats with the cold hatred that Luther gave to the invocation of saints or to the selling of indulgences. “Aerobic activities are dangerous! Running is extremely high force activity,” he writes. “You cannot ‘train your wind.’ The lungs can always perform their job quite actively. Maximal oxygen uptake is 95.9 percent genetically determined. It is the muscles that actually perform work, and only the muscles can be trained. The ‘wind’ and ‘lungs’ and ‘aerobics’ have nothing
to do with it. The enthusiastic aerobic dancer or jogger will pay the price for all that ‘healthy activity.’ If everyone in the U.S. immediately stopped performing the activities they pursued as ‘exercise ’ the collective health of the nation would improve dramatically,” he concludes, nailing his theses, not quite ninety-nine but counting, to the door of every false gym in the country.

All that matters to the body (and, so the hidden corollary runs, to the soul, as well) is resistance. That is what the body is made to learn from, and all that it is made to learn from. “When you are dead, will your muscles still have resistance? Yes.” Death is the perfect exercise condition; and for a moment he sees the dead being exercised by their personal trainers. The Founder in Florida minces no words, makes no concessions to niceness. He warns repeatedly against something called Val Salva's maneuver, which sounds like an erotic act performed on Kim Novak or Angie Dickinson by a lounge singer from the Rat Pack era, but is in fact the act of holding your breath while working your muscles. (“Elderly people are commonly found dead of a stroke on the commode,” he writes mordantly, “as a result of the increase in BP as they Val Salva.”) Overweight? “The real problem with modern obesity is food abundance,” he writes flatly. Eat less.

Above all, the Founder underlines the difference between exercise and recreation. “Elevated heart rate is not an indicator of exercise intensity, or value. It is quite possible to experience an elevated pulse, labored breathing, and profuse sweating without achieving valuable exercise. Intense emotional experiences commonly cause these symptoms without a shred of exercise benefit…. The ‘experts’ say that gentle low-intensity activities use the aerobic pathway to a greater degree than they use the anaerobic pathway. We agree with this statement completely and feel that it should be taken to its logical conclusion: The most ‘aerobic’ activity that a human being can engage in,” he concludes, “is sleeping.”

T
he dream of the perfect tortoise seems to have penetrated even to the children. The boys lend their fathers their iPods and MP3s to go running with, ashamed of the old Discman, and their contents are
stunning in their catholicity, their embracing universality. There are hundreds of melodies, countless songs, everything from Aerosmith to Al Yankovic. The new songs are wonderful but very much like the old songs: Donovan could have sung “Yellow,” the MC5 “American Idiot.”

“Who do you like more, Green Day or Coldplay?” the father says, looking at the range of songs on the two-hundred-song list, thinking,
He must have favorites.

The boy shrugs. “They're both good. It's like asking who you like more, the Beatles or the Stones.” And the father is stunned, both by the serene wisdom of the answer and by its ease with history; the Beatles’ music is thirty years old, no, forty years old—any knowledge he would have had at that age, of music in the 1920s or ’30s, dearly won, teased out of old Ella Fitzgerald records.

But the boy must be chasing
something.
In the past, to choose a band was to not choose some other band. Kids really hated things—stupidly, of course, since their hates extended to the very best things there were. (They hated sensitive singer-songwriters, and then these turned out to be Joni Mitchell, evergreen and blue.)

“Isn't there anybody who you really hate? Britney Spears? Or what's-her-name, Avril Lavigne?” Avril Lavigne had been very big a year before, the Gidget of grunge, and, he senses, is no longer.

But the boy shrugs. “She's okay, I guess. Some of her songs are okay, I guess. I just don't listen to the ones that aren't.” The iPod is a protective shell; by including everything, it eliminates the rooting interest—reduces albums brutally to playlists, eliminates choices as surely as the CD eliminated sides. You don't have to choose; you don't have to be enraged; you just glide right past the bad songs. Their attitude isn't a form of cool, and is a million miles from irony, more a form of sobered-up acceptance. The children live in comfort and understand fear, and they prepare their iPods for a dark age, like a medieval monk stocking his library with the classical essentials just before the vandals come. Even their idea of exercise is like their idea of music: a little of this, a little of that. They wear their Heelys, shoes with wheels that pop out from their soles, enabling them to walk and then run and then stutter-step and then suddenly and smoothly glide
down the sidewalk in imperturbable cool, rolling right away, so that walking and running and stepping are all one fluid thing. They come to the edge of the reservoir and watch their fathers run, and smile benevolently, practicing their gliding on the edge of the grass. “Running is, like, so over, Dad,” the boy says when his father appears at last, and he glides away to school.

S
peed is over,” the Motionless Mothers say, mocking the trend writers but meaning it, too. “You should slow down. Give it up.”

Books now appear every month in praise of slowness, volumes raining down. The new books inventory all the new
kinds
of self-improving slowness: They appear in praise of slow music, slow food, slow exercise, and slowed-down living,
Slow Food
and
Bonjour Laziness
and
How to Be Idle
and
In Praise of Slowness.
Tantric sex and seven-hour lamb are the pleasures of the moment, signs of virtue restored and sanity renewed. If you do everything more slowly—cook, make love, work out—your muscles will be larger, your food tastier, your children saner. You will, in short,
have won the race.
The tortoise is not merely wiser than the hare; he is actually faster, if the race course is long enough. Astonishingly, the authors seem unaware that they, too, are hamsters trapped on a wheel set by publishers, condemned to their contrarianism. (The rhetoric of slowness in the books is belied by the speediness of their appearance; the sweat almost glistens on their covers, like traces of the perspiration of their editors, racing to get the books on the shelves before the slow moment passes.)

Some kinds of slowness are, the Running Fathers think, truly called slow: If you just stopped working, stopped moving, stopped paying the rent or the mortgage, the children's tuition, then yes, you would be slow, off the track, standing still. But that kind of immobility is impossible, and the slowness that takes its place isn't really slow at all. If you set out to braise a leg of lamb, or to make a “classic” peasant pork stew, you are busy all day long. There are lardons to crisp and fat to skim and a hundred small slow decisions to make. Slow cooking offers no escape from the relentlessness of modern life; it just introduces a new and modish form of relentlessness.

Fast and slow, truth be told, will always catch up with each other. Anytime one attempts to insert speed into any system, slowness results. The traffic jam was the old, last-century proof of this truth. Airplane travel, so wonderfully speedy—imagine hinting to Ben Franklin that the day would come when you could get to Paris in seven hours!—becomes enbarnacled by an apparatus so slow (the freeway, the check-in, the security lines, the long drive through the congealing airport traffic on the other side) that the primary experience of air travel is its excruciating tedium.

But anytime you attempt to insert
slowness
into the system, life speeds up somewhere else. In aristocratic societies, it was possible at least to transfer the energy throughout a society: The leisure of Madame de Pompadour was supported by the desperate busyness of her servants. In modern bourgeois societies, though, where we are our own servants, any speed added produces slowness somewhere else
in your own life
—the equilibrium of slow and fast has become internalized in single bodies, a single consciousness. The balance that used to seek and spread across a civilization is now centered in a single soul; any slowness inserted to calm you down produces speed that wears you out. The economy of fast and slow, no matter how you try to adjust it, will always remain in perfect balance.

F
or here is the deep truth. There really is no fast. There is no slow. There is only time. Time is immovable; there is only so much of it, and it cannot be nudged or massaged or managed.
It
is the absolute thing, Time, and it is everywhere, like dust mites and smog.

The Running Fathers sit sipping lattes at the Starbucks on Columbus Avenue after the morning run, waiting with annoyance for two twenty somethings to pack up their computers so there will be free seats. But then what's the rush? When your work is done, they know, you are done. Each creature on earth has more or less exactly the same number of heartbeats, the same track to race around. The hummingbird uses his up in a week, the elephant in a century, but the consciousness, their experience of the time passed, is the same. We are calibrated to have as many heartbeats as we need. It is why retired athletes look
dazed and drunken—they
are
dazed and drunken; they are finished. If you run, you use up your heartbeats. Running around the reservoir is a form of disguised middle-class suicide. It is no accident, a Running Father explains to another, that Mozart died at thirty-five, that Keats passed away at twenty-six: They had harvested themselves, used up their heartbeats. (Seemingly long-lived artists are always film directors or conductors or editors, who are inspired parasites leaching off others’ heartbeats, others’ music.)

The other Running Father nods. He recalls the moment that he got that, too. He was working out on the treadmill once, and pushing as hard as he could to derive the heartbeat-per-minute rate forward, and he ran faster, and then faster, but the heartbeat counter wouldn't move up! It just kept blinking, rising steadily from one to ten, and then falling back down to zero and then back up to ten, and then back down to zero—no matter how hard he pushed, or how much he strained, it would rise up and then fall back.

He thought that maybe he was having the beginnings of a heart attack until he realized that … he was looking at the wrong display! He wasn't looking at the heartbeat-per-minute rate. He was looking
at the seconds ticking by on the digital timer
—and they were so perfect, so smooth, so completely unchanging, so completely indifferent, that he was terrified. Nothing he did affected the polite, impassive digits, moving majestically onward.

“I just stopped running, and I was standing there sweating, just staring at them, and the heart rate went swooshing down to normal, but the second counter, the little digital clock, just went right on blinking, just imperturbable, like a child looking up at you, innocent and unaffected. And I realized what it was, and …” They nod together and sip: There is no fast. There is no slow. There is only time.

W
hy, then, do they run? They have learned from the trainer that running is futile; they have gathered from their wives that running is unnecessary; they have heard from their children that running is over; they know from their own knees and ankles that running is a pain. Given the realities of the body, the recalcitrance of the muscles, the
illusion of aerobics, the fact that time is running out and heartbeats are being used up, why run at all? Why do we still see them, heads down, arms awkward, running around the reservoir every morning before work, every evening before dinner? Their knees ache and their lungs burn and they know that none of it helps anything. Knowing better, why do they persist? It is, perhaps, not exercise at all, not even a waste of heartbeats, that drives then forward, however clumsily. They are not racing to get anywhere, or rehearsing to overtake their competitors, or running to become faster runners tomorrow. They are not running in search of something, or toward someplace, or against someone. They are running away.