Rubicundity: Fitness

Skip the B.S.

“If it’s just the appearance of fitness one desires, silicone pectoral implants are available for $15,000 from your local plastic surgeon. Kids get off easy: a silicone pectoral vest can be purchased for $133. Another approach includes displaying Swarovski crystal dumbbells ($883 a pair) around your home beside a custom yoga mat ($185). If that’s out of your price range, and you want to look like a plastic bag of beef livers, treat yourself to an aerosol tan, let it dry, smear your exposed limbs with baby oil, and take a walk on the beach.”—Skip Eisiminger

By Skip Eisiminger

I. “If man’s chief interest/is his own health,/there’s little hope/for the commonwealth.”—The Wordspinner

PENDLETON South Carolina—(Hubris)—January/February 2025—There was a time when I could leave the line at the Squat and Gobble and hear people say, “I envy that guy’s metabolism.” That was when my bike was my time machine, the pool was my baptismal font, and my softball teammates were the Immortals. I was one of the few in the Clemson English Department who knew the difference between “stomach muscles” and “abs,” “chest muscles” and “pecs,” “thighs” and “quads.” When my peers thought their muscular prose would suffice, I swam, cycled, or jogged thrice a week and occasionally hit the weight room. Yes, I was pushing 50, but pulling 45 was as easy as tweezing a few wild hairs from my unibrow. Today I’m pushing 85 but pulling 83, and the difference is grave. I remind myself of that smiling fellow in Lee Lorenz’s cartoon who’s bopping along the avenue following his annual physical congratulating himself on lowering his cholesterol to 190; his BP to 130 over 70, and his blood sugar to 95. Overhead, a bank safe is plummeting.

Many of my former colleagues, alluded to above, are deceased. One died in his 60s in his recliner while a man older than he mowed his lawn. Another needed surgery when the hamstrings in his left leg atrophied. Why tendon atrophy in a man 40 years old? He crossed his left leg over his right every night and did not move it for five hours while he read Russian novels. Another told me his fitness goal was not to lose consciousness when he clipped his toenails. I was thinking of him recently waiting to drink from the gym’s water fountain. Ahead of me were two pre-teens splashing water on their tee shirts. When I asked what they were doing, they said their coach had been called away, and all this “sweat” would convince him of their hard work when he returned. They giggled and walked off pleased with themselves. When I finally made it to the weight room, I found a bespectacled, earbudded young man seated at my favorite machine reading his texts. He sat there for 20 minutes before I finally asked if I could work in. He blushed, excused himself, and left. When I was finished with my workout, I wrote the following suggestion for some new signs to be posted under the “Do Not Drop the Weights” signs. I wrote, “Please do not monopolize the machines. Limit yourself to 3 sets when people are waiting. You might even invite people waiting to work in.” Alas, that fell on deaf ears. Instead, I got, “Spray your rag, not the machines.”

There are two schools of thought when it comes to exercise: one believes that gym rats should, “Go hard or go home.” This school warns its adherents, “No pecs, no sex,” and, “Life is short, play hard.” But even in high school and the army, I was more of a “party-in-peace—any-motion-is-lotion—no-pain?-good!” kind of guy. At 83, rubicundity is my goal—the bluish hue of red corpuscles coursing under my olive skin. Of those seeking “washboard” abs, I would ask, “What do you wish to wash there?” For those with shredded “guns” exposed on sunny days, I would ask, “What do you aim to shoot?”

II. “Some pass the graveyard/flaunting their fettle,/but every pink bloom/loses its petal.”—The Wordspinner

In a rare work of fiction, I once created a character named Rhabdo, who’d read in some unimpeachable tabloid that running an hour adds seven hours to a runner’s life. Rhabdo then calculated that if he ran 3.5 hours daily, he could add a little more than a day to his life. In other words, he believed he’d discovered the secret to immortality. Sadly, after a few years of this regimen, Rhabdo died of rhabdomyolysis (talk about life being scripted) which is over-exercise in the Greek that Rhabdo didn’t have time to learn but unlearned in -1 heartbeat.

It’s true that Jack LaLanne exercised every day, consumed a lot of pureed vegetables, and lived to 96, but for every Jack in this game, I’ll raise you ten Rhabdos who subscribe to “salvation by perspiration.” Another New Yorker cartoon succinctly summarizes the LaLanne school of fitness: Roz Chast imagines her version of Rhabdo running 20 MPH on a treadmill set at a 50-degree incline with a 1000-pound barbell overhead. It’s called “The Seven-Second Workout.” “That’s not exercise,” Noel Coward used to say, “that’s flagellation.”

I’m not sure where and when this relatively recent activity began, but I’ll posit the year 1953. Some will argue for 1981, when Jane Fonda included a chapter on “Advanced Buttocks” in her popular workout book, but I’m not convinced. 1953 is the year when the first human bench-pressed 500 pounds; today that record is 1,401 pounds! That’s a gain of almost a half-ton in less than a century. How is that possible? Well, steroids and human-growth hormones have helped, but often it’s just fanatical determination epitomized by the routine the writer Dan Brown follows. He has programed his computer to freeze for 60 seconds every hour, which gives him enough time to do 30 sit-ups and 20 push-ups. Make that 59 minutes out of every hour, and you have the dedication required for a doped-up cyclist like Lance Armstrong to ride 32 MPH for 60 minutes. I tried that once and retched on the road before the first minute was out. Retching, of course, is why some CrossFit gyms have open garbage cans with plastic liners centrally located for everyone’s convenience.

If it’s just the appearance of fitness one desires, silicone pectoral implants are available for $15,000 from your local plastic surgeon. Kids get off easy: a silicone pectoral vest can be purchased for $133. Another approach includes displaying Swarovski crystal dumbbells ($883 a pair) around your home beside a custom yoga mat ($185). If that’s out of your price range, and you want to look like a plastic bag of beef livers, treat yourself to an aerosol tan, let it dry, smear your exposed limbs with baby oil, and take a walk on the beach.

III. “Earth-bound Earl/opted for a plodding pace/and finding the nearest/parking place.”—The Wordspinner

My neighbor Earl is “soft and white as a veal calf in a dark shed” as a music critic once described the Chinese pianist Lang Lang. Earl has season tickets to the Clemson football games which he uses to park his Winnebago a block from the stadium. When he arrives, his wife Molly fires up the grill for her tailgating neighbors while Earl sets up their 98” Samsung under the sunscreen. When the game starts, these two Tiger fans relax with a plate of barbeque, a beer, a few grazing friends, and watch the game. No hard, backless stadium seats for them.

My wife first met Molly at the university natatorium. While Ingrid water jogged for an hour, Molly treaded water with the aid of a flotation belt, swim fins on her hands and feet, and floaties to support her arms. Ingrid noted that Molly enjoyed their chat but yawned a lot and complained of being cold. Molly subscribes to Donald Trump’s “battery theory of energy”: humans are born with just so many volts to discharge over a lifetime, and vigorous exercise just depletes the power supply.

I frequently hear people like Molly and Earl saying, “The only squats I do are diddly,” or, “Exercise is OK if it’s between consenting adults in private,” or, “Caffeine is my exercise.” A colleague in political science proudly counted himself in Earl’s school. He told me once on the Strode Tower elevator that he got all the exercise he needed serving as a pallbearer for his peripatetic colleagues. He died shortly after retiring.

IV. “Those who argue/‘A jog is stupidity,’/miss the jogger’s/compressed morbidity.” —The Wordspinner

Speaking of deceased peripatetics, I read somewhere that Jesus walked 21,595 miles, or about seven miles a day, during his brief life; Siddhartha Gautama practiced yoga and other forms of extreme asceticism but rejected them after nearly dying of over-exertion; Muhammad hiked, wrestled, and swam; and I’ve seen photographs of the Dalai Lama on a treadmill. Though I Timothy 4:8 says, “Bodily exercise profiteth little,” why did I never in my Sunday-School and church-going days hear anything about the vices or virtues of physical exercise? Between 1947 and 1955, Bernarr Macfadden, who led the Cosmotarian Church, preached that only those who lifted weights and ate vegan when they weren’t fasting belonged to God’s elite. He died at 87 after refusing medical treatment for a treatable infection.

A Latinist colleague reminded me once that Juvenal’s famous ideal, “a sound mind in a sound body,” was a joking reference aimed at his fitness-obsessed friends. I like to think the Roman satirist was aiming his disguised uppercut at Jim Fixx, Euell Gibbons, and Adele Davis, all strong, modern proponents of a healthy diet and regular exercise, all of whom died young.

If you’re still confused on the issue of fitness, I’ll leave you with the following bankable axioms: sitting is the new way to smoke; health is the slowest way to die, and with or without diet and exercise, your body will last a lifetime. Nevertheless, I’ll eat an apple, take a walk and a nap, and drink some Adam’s ale. Adam, if you recall, lived 930 years, almost as long as Methuselah.