Running Up That Treadmill
🎵it actually hurt me, yeah yeah ooh ohh🎵
This month, your long embattled treadmill will fling you from its narrow plank onto the poorly maintained wood floor of your apartment. By a stroke of luck, you’ll manage to avoid careening your head into the nearby radiator on your way to the floor, though you do come perilously close. This is not the first time you have been tossed from its runway—so swiftly and unceremoniously it’s as if a crewful of pirates on a sinking ship agreed you were the cargo that needed to be thrown overboard—but it will be the last. For this month, you discover the limit to how many times a woman wearing an ill-fitting, twelve years worn bra originally purchased in a three pack from Costco (the other two once residing with your Mother and sister, three woman with entirely different sized breasts) can be careened from a jaunty little fitness tarmac before she decides that enough is enough.
It can be difficult to grasp how a woman passionately dedicated to her treadmill safety clip could so frequently and abruptly find herself with a one way ticket to the floor. One might even assume that the point of a treadmill safety clip is to avoid being tossed onto the ground! But actually, the practical purpose of this primitive piece of technology is to avoid falling onto a moving treadmill belt—think of the abrasion! the long, drawn out process of getting up! your hair!
Even in the privacy of your own home, your treadmill safety clip is a rather embarrassing concession to personal protection. Attaching a small red clip to your shirt—a clip which is connected to a red string, which is connected to a red magnet that connects to your treadmill—has become second nature. But when your treadmill first moved in five years ago, donning the safety clip felt like an overreaction—wearing a life vest in a kiddie pool. After all, this treadmill was only for speed walking to a) avoid street harassment which, for you personally, had skyrocketed during the pandemic, and b) find a way to watch unfathomable amounts of reality television (something you can admit is probably unhealthy only in particularly conciliatory moods) with something comparatively more healthy (stomping around).
Soon you conceded, deciding it was idiotic to rebel against safety, and you began dutifully clipping yourself in for each walk, even though your husband bravely told you this crucial accessory made you look like a toddler (the fact that you exercise without pants certainly contributed to his assessment, which The Skies wholeheartedly agree with).
After all, Virgo, you are either following rules to a T or disobeying them flagrantly. It isn’t always easy to predict which extreme will call to you, but you can bet your bottom dollar that whichever you choose, you will cast judgement on those making the other choices with cartoonish lack of compassion. Though you do not ride bikes, you’ve always assumed that if you did, you’d have the social bravery to wear a helmet and therefore consider anyone not wearing a helmet a vain social coward, entreating the world with the responsibility of their health and safety while themselves shirking all personal accountability in service of being Young, Wild, and Free. Big talk for a person too scared of the world to peddle a two-wheeled machine, who (if less riddled with personal terror) I can very easily picture rejecting a helmet with a flimsy comment about her bangs.
Your treadmill appears in size and ability to be the careless lovechild of a walking pad and a sickly, unwanted relic of exercise trends past splayed on the sidewalk wearing a FREE sign written on wide ruled paper. In order to have a treadmill in your home (and therefore retire from requiring the outdoors to provide you with exercise and consequently avoiding the gentleman who ran from his hiding place between cars to film himself grabbing your ass on a Sunday at noon) you needed to find an option that folded flat and could be stored beneath your bed.
Though many treadmill options advertise their ability to fold flat, the industry definition of “flat” appears to be figurative. Or perhaps geometric, because the result of the folding is often not flat, but instead an enormous, upright triangle. It’s impossible to imagine what problem is solved by a gargantuan machine being folded into a still-gigantic, top-heavy triangle, but this appears to be a problem for which the majority of treadmill users are seeking a solution.
Once you were willing to give up on having a good treadmill—one with the ability to incline, one with a belt long enough to avoid permanently sacrificing your natural stride, one without an easily compromised bluetooth speaker used exclusively for beep beep beeps when turned on—a relatively inexpensive option revealed itself.
When the magnet piece of your treadmill safety clip is disconnected from the machine, it thinks you have fallen down and therefore stops dead in its tracks. Thankfully, you’ve never fallen on your treadmill requiring saving by the machine’s abrupt cessation. Unfortunately, it’s the solution—the stopping itself—that typically catapults you into danger. The safety clip’s disconnection is usually because of the wild, pumping arm movements accompanying your exercise—as if you were skiing in the Olympics instead of walking on a completely flat surface at a moderate speed. Yes, it’s your wily limbs that slap the magnet away from its cradle, throwing you directly into the eye of the storm (your floor that’s been repaired with wood glue and filler so many times that there are always dried, brittle cubes of floor-adjacent material everywhere you step).
Never one to suffer in silence, your falls are paired with a throttling, guttural cry. Prior to this month, you’ve been able to dust yourself off from each fall (swipe the bits of floor from your exposed thighs) and hop back in the saddle to finish what you started (an episode of RHOA). But this month, the treadmill flings you from your perch not as a consequence for your (perhaps overwrought) performance of exercise, but as a technological error.
As usual, you Scream-Queen shriek as you soar—ass first—into the unwelcoming floor, and as your husband rushes in for the caring but perfunctory post-fall debrief, you will lock eyes and realize that this time is different. It’s one thing to fling yourself to the ground, but the machine being responsible is simply too much to bear. Your ol’ reliable can’t be trusted anymore, and it may be time to put her out to pasture (keep the treadmill in the exact same location as always with an idle yet needling desire to repair it which you know deeply will never come to fruition).
You try to make the best of your retirement from a life on the ‘mill by spending more time lifting weights and prioritizing strength training, but nothing can replace the surge of endorphins born from coupling cardio and Survivor. You’ll listlessly research gym memberships but insist you don’t have enough cute gym-wear to be able to commit to a habit with any frequency (again, you’re unaccustomed to exercising with pants).
Always unburdened by the ability to notice cause and effect, you will spend the coming weeks unaware of the connection between your rising anxiety levels and the absence of your favorite way to let off steam. What you will realize is that exercise was one of the only moments of your life when you were able to enjoy a manufactured solitude. Even if your apartment wasn’t empty, your focus and headphones allowed you to disappear into an activity without anyone of anything interrupting you. When you’re walking too animatedly to text coherently, you don’t feel guilty about not responding. When you’re on a whirring machine that could eject you should you misplace a foot for a millisecond, your husband isn’t going to ask you about what you want for lunch. When you are huffing and puffing, you don’t feel obligated to pause and buzz in your neighbor’s doordash order. There is a slowness to strength exercise that doesn’t offer quite as powerful of a personal forcefield.
You soon discover there are no moments of your day in which you can expect a thought to go uninterrupted. Since your job is handing food to people who wish they could stab you in the face with legal impunity, your workday doesn’t offer many opportunities for tranquil self-reflection. Your commute is about the only alone time available. Sometimes it’s a peaceful trek from point A to point B during which you connect with a book or song, but other times it’s devoted entirely to frantically catching up on correspondence, or attempting to be as neutral as possible so the person shouting into the heavens doesn’t choose to shout at you instead.
Given these conditions, it’s a surprise to no one aside from yourself that this month you have about six hundred different episodes of emotional volcanic eruption. Sure, you’ve miraculously identified the issue—lack of solitude—but you haven’t yet fully constructed a solution. I am floored by your limited imagination, Virgo. For a person convinced they are a perfect candidate for a life of quiet reflection by the sea, you appear to require both contemporary advancement in technology (treadmills that can be pancake-flat) and entertainment (Real Housewives: Ultimate Girls Trip, in which the best of the best from each franchise go on vacation together for some reason) in order to maintain any daily semblance of emotional balance.
You’re never quick to make an obvious personal discovery, Virgo, but I am rather thrilled you’ve been able to lift your wan, overly social hand to point a finger towards the source of your feeble temperament. And that’s something.
I know that you’re pretending your hangups about a gym membership revolve around the outfits, but with my omniscient access to the wee corners of your mind I can plainly see that you’re actually afraid you don’t have the confidence to publicly gaze with sincerity into an iPad screening a tearful testimonial from Sister Wives’ Robyn Brown while speed-walking in an earnest and effortful way. I implore you to conquer that fear so that your spiritual practice of crying when other people’s children go to college on reality television shows can be reinstated, making you whole once more.
Perhaps with practice, your solitude could extend beyond the sweaty perimeter of exercise. But for now we must be content with baby steps. Luckily, you’ve been perfecting baby steps for years on your too small, gait destroying, crappy little treadmill.