Tuesday, 20 September 2011
RT #4: The Test
Tuesday, September 20, 2011, 10:40 a.m.
I know a woman, 40 now, with twins, who grew up thinking people were looking at her. From the time she was a little girl, she walked a certain way, held her head just so, because she assumed she was being watched. Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but by the time she was 8, she wound up being cast in a Broadway play.
I’ve never thought people were looking at me and, in fact, as a young reporter I worked on developing the opposite ability -- a skill for blending in. The art of not being seen. Covering episodes of mayhem, I learned to pass through police barricades and duck beneath caution tape as if they were not there and I was invisible.
One of the most satisfying moments of my early career came one night when I was hanging around the cafeteria at police headquarters in Chicago looking for information about a gang shooting. It was about 2 a.m. and I was sitting by myself at a table with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, when a detective sat down in front of me and said, “All right, here’s what happened.” He proceeded to describe the crime with the kind of detail cops never share with reporters. I furiously took notes and had almost the entire story when the lawyer from the state’s attorney’s office walked up and introduced himself. This was the guy the detective was looking for when he sat down across from me by mistake.
The cop looked at me and said, “Who the hell are you?”
“City News Bureau.”
Choice words were then shouted.
Last Sunday morning, more than 100 people where inside Breakthru Fitness to be weighed, measured, have their “before” pictures taken, and take a fitness test. This was the orientation for the “Peak” fitness program (as I write this, my first official workout begins in one hour and 20 minutes) and I could feel the nerves in the crowd, not just my own.
I’ve been working out for 10 weeks just to get ready for this program, and I’ve lost six pounds, down from 226 to 220, but I’d still rather not take my shirt off in public. Fortunately there is a screen and I stand behind it, visible only to the photographer and some of the assistants logging information on clipboards. Side view, front view, and then the photographer asks me to flex -- say What? -- arms up, fists to the sides of my head like a boxer. One click and now that picture is floating around somewhere.
I’m surprised and disappointed to find that the scale, the accurate, doctor’s office kind with the balance bar, is not working. It has me at 224, but rather than complain I immediately go into the locker room where there is a digital scale I know works correctly. It puts me at 223.8. Bizarre coincidence that both scales are malfunctioning four pounds heavy on the same day.
I don’t want to take the fitness test and I’m thinking maybe I should postpone this test due to injury. Sometimes when I run for more than an hour, one of my calf muscles will tighten up like a steel knot, and when it’s bad it means three weeks of limping. I ran seven miles yesterday, if you can call this running -- staggering north from Garfield Park past the 210 and back in an hour and 20 minutes, but still, it was depleting. It would be stupid to screw up and miss three weeks of the Peak program just because I wasn’t willing to back off a little bit at the outset and not do this test.
There are other reasons this test might not be right for me. The test is a series of programmed failures, 10 exercises taken one at a time -- pushups, burpees, side lunges, etc -- each performed for 60 seconds, as many as you can do, until you are lying in a puddle of your own sweat, tongue hanging out, unable to do a single one more. Then 60 seconds of rest and when the bell rings, literally, you tear into the next one. I’m concerned this might not be good for my self-esteem; I’m probably going to need my self-esteem to be healthy and intact in order to summon the confidence I’ll need to complete this program.
Self-esteem is crucial when I’m trying to persuade myself I can do something that, objectively, I may not be able to do. The people running this program are going to ask me to stop eating large amounts of nutritionally derelict food. I don’t know if I can do that. If I were capable of it, wouldn’t I have done it already? I’m fine when I’m in the club. The club is not the kind of place where office workers shaped like bowling balls bring in layer cakes to celebrate the fact that it’s Wednesday. But they don’t let you move in to the club. I have to walk around in my life where dozens of times a day, a voice in my head offers me food that will blow that delicate caloric equation (calories in + 500 = calories out) right out of the water.
Then there is the exercise component. If this was about jogging around the Rose Bowl, or running up and down on an asphalt court playing pickup basketball, or even swimming, I know I could do that. But floor exercises in a mirrored room on a gleaming wood floor surrounded by a lot of really good-looking people in spandex? If you go up for a rebound in a city park pickup game and the sweat of some middle-aged guy with three knee braces goes flying in your eyes, you can’t complain. It’s not a genteel milieu. But if everyone in the pristine fitness room is slide stepping left-right and I go right-left, mowing down a 98-pound mother of triplets from San Marino, they might ask me to leave and who could blame them?
Fear is like a rainstorm that makes me want to come to my senses and go home. Tea and cornbread. Fear is the rain that fills the garden with weeds of doubt.
I’m afraid to go in the room and only slightly more afraid not to. I am called to it. I am called to the moment that occurs in there by design, when there isn’t anything left, no more energy, no more will, but there has to be. I’ve been in rooms like this before and I know it’s consecrated to the purpose of moving its occupants to the edge, where the next moment of performance hangs off the cliff of wonder and dangles over the chasm of doubt. Can you do it? It’s the vortex of the perpetual question. It’s life on the frontier of uncertainty. That’s why relatively few people go in the room. It’s the test most of us don’t want to take.
*****
“Anyone who didn’t do 20 pushups, you can leave now,” the football coach inside my mind is saying. ““Twelve pushups? Twelve (12)? Just get out. You’ve been given the gift of a human body. You’ve been given a brain that’s capable of more than any computer ever invented. You’ve been given a heart that is more sophisticated than any pump, any single piece of technology ever devised. Lungs, muscles, blood, all of it…. beyond incredible. Yet, how do you treat it? You feed your body crap when you know better. You feed your mind endless amounts of drivel. You sit around giving in to sloth. You stay up late indulging your anxiety when you should be sleeping.
“Twelve pushups in 60 seconds? Not 20? Not 15, much less 50? Are you kidding? The only thing you are going to produce here is embarrassment. Quit while you’re ahead. Go home. Now.”
But the sound that filled the room, not the inside of my head, the voice that came over the music and the beat, belonged to the mic’d woman wearing the headset, encouraging in the 60-second intervals that came between the onslaughts. “You’re doing great, you look really great.” I looked up from where I was wiping the floor with my towel, slick like glass with sweat where I had collapsed, thinking she might be kidding, but she was not, she was smiling and she meant it and she seemed aware of me, as I pondered the predicament of disappearing, taxing my talent for going unseen, challenging in this cafeteria, how to conceal a water buffalo in a room full of mirrors and spandex.
But there was no time for anything because the bell was ringing, the music was accelerating, the next test was starting. Life in the vortex of the 13th pushup here in the Last Chance Saloon.
stay tuned...
