Navel Gazing

by Michael Ian Black

  Alas, I am the scrawny and pale. Upon my entering, the front-desk Amazon would barely register my presence while swiping my membership card. Not even a “Have a good workout.” Maybe it was for the best. After all, we both knew I would not be having a good workout. More apt would be if she had wished me a “grudging, slightly embarrassed workout.” That was the sort of workout I would be having, and we both knew it. Once inside, my usual exercise routine was to skulk from machine to machine, avoiding eye contact with the demigods before me. Not that I needed to make any special effort to avoid their gaze: To them I was invisible.

  My attendance declined over time, from four times a week, to three, to two, then finally to the occasional passing glance as I drove to In-N-Out Burger. For a while, I did see some modest improvement in my physique, but I never felt comfortable there among the better members of my species, and I eventually stopped going altogether, preferring to spend my time among my people, the schlubby Jews writing terrible screenplays at Starbucks.

  My final attempt at regular weightlifting took place after I moved to my current town in the wilds of Connecticut. I picked this particular gym because membership came with three personal training sessions. I figured those free sessions would guarantee at least three trips to the gym because, although I hate working out, I hate losing out on free stuff more. The trainer promised to create for me an individualized workout regimen. All I had to do was follow it for a couple months, slap on some bronzer, and win Mr. Olympia.

  I selected a female trainer out of fear that a male trainer would make fun of me. My fear turned out to be baseless. The female trainer I selected proved just as capable of making fun of me as any man.

  At our first session, she led me around to the different machines we’d be working on, setting the load at what she thought I could handle, then gradually taking weight off when she realized I could not. This happened at every machine we visited: the leg press, shoulder press, chest thingy, back-of-the-leg thingy, other thingy. Maybe she knew the weights were too heavy and was subtly teasing me. But I doubt it. I think she found herself genuinely surprised every time I could not lift even the small amount of weight she selected. After an hour of lifting things and putting them down, punctuated by exasperated sighs from my trainer, I was freed from my labors and stumbled to my car, legs as pliable as willow branches.

  We met again the following week. This time my trainer had a touch more sympathy for my delicate condition and smirked at my struggles less, even saying, “Nice job,” after I completed my sets. But it wasn’t a nice job. It was survival and whimpering. By week three, my soreness had abated somewhat, which made me push myself harder, which solicited more praise from the trainer. She pronounced me ready to tackle the gym on my own. I promised to make her proud. We shook hands. It hurt.

  My first solo session ended about twenty minutes after it began when I found myself unable to stand while performing a squat. The squat is one of the major compound exercises wherein the worker-outer drapes a weighted barbell across his or her back, descends to a squatting position, then stands back up, a simple enough task to accomplish until one attempts to do it. Halfway through my second set, I descended to the squatting position and attempted to rise but found myself unable to do so. Trainers recommend having a spotter for occasions such as this, but I hadn’t asked anybody to spot me because I am shy about asking muscular people for help owing to the fact that, when I was in high school, muscular people used to push me around and call me “faggot.”

  Finally, I did the only thing I could think of to do, which was to allow the barbell to roll along the top of my spine and onto the floor, compacting several vertebrae in the process. It landed with a metallic CLANK!, sending all eyes in my direction. Mortified, I tried to lift the barbell back onto the weight rack but found this task impossible as well. So I left the weight there on the floor and did what one does in such a situation—I ran away.

  That was all the excuse I needed to never return to that gym. I kept telling myself I would, kept reassuring myself that I just needed to get back to work. But I didn’t. Just like I didn’t return to any of the gyms I have joined and quit over the years, letting the monthly charges accumulate, on average, about two years before removing myself from their membership rolls.

  The worst moment of joining a gym is the moment when Martha notices I haven’t been going for a couple weeks. “Are you going to go back to the gym?” she might ask in a tone she would probably describe as “curious,” and which I would describe as “passive-aggressive.”

  The answer, of course, is no. No, I am not going back to the gym. Not ever. So I say, “Yes. I’m going back to the gym.”

  “Because if you’re not going back to the gym, we should call them so they don’t charge us every month.”

  “That would be the right thing to do if I weren’t going back to the gym, but because I am, there’s no need to call them.”

  “Because you always say you’re going back and then you don’t and we end up paying for the gym for two years even though you’re not using it.”

  “I know that has happened in the past, but not this time.”

  Two years later, I call to get my name removed from the membership rolls.

  My dream of looking like 1 percent of a professional bodybuilder is dead, just like my dreams of getting into shape by swimming, and my mountain biking dreams, and all the other dreams I have ever had of one day unearthing Bruce Whitehall from the sickly shell in which he is encased.

  Maybe I could lower my expectations. Maybe I could just make small improvements on what I am instead of trying to make myself into something I will never be.

  I had to try something, but what? Team sports were out because that would involve interacting with other people. I mean, what was I going to do? Join a team and get to know people and maybe go out for drinks afterward to recount some hilarious event that had just transpired on the field of play and wind up with a bunch of new friends bound together by the camaraderie that unites men who have struggled together to achieve some arduous goal? How stupid would that be? No, whatever I decided to do had to be a solitary activity, one that required no expensive equipment or lessons or fixed schedules. Something I could do at my own pace in my own time, preferably something I already knew how to do. Really, there was only one sport left. But it was a sport that filled me with dread and fear. Even so, I had to try. So I went for a run.

  It sucked.

  Chapter Eleven

  My arrogance is stronger than my brain

  There are many running books out there—dozens, maybe hundreds—that will inform the reader on all manner of running topics: footwear, training programs, proper form, diet, and so on. But none of them will tell you running’s primary attribute, which is that it sucks. Running advocates focus on the sport’s non-sucky elements, the most cited being the “runner’s high,” that mystical endorphin rush runners experience when they have pushed themselves into a blissful state of forgetting the fact that they are running. I, too, have experienced the runner’s high. I get it every time I stop.

  There are two reasons running sucks. The first is because it’s boring. Putting foot in front of foot for an hour or more at a time is tedious, even when listening to music or podcasts or books on tape or motivational speakers or TED talks or the sound of the woods or any of the other distractions I have used to pass the time.

  The runner is encouraged to experience the outdoors, to take in its bounty, to feel the wind against his face and know he is one with his environment. The runner is asked to launch himself through space by the volition of his own feet, to propel himself across its vast and wondrous terrain and to feel himself to be master of his own destiny as he surveys the world, arms akimbo, from the top of its mountains, mountains he has summited through the application of willpower alone, the diligent repetition of footstep following footstep leading, incredibly—inevitably—to glory. It sounds noble, and I suppose it is, in the way that suffering can become ennobling, particu
larly when somebody else is doing the suffering.

  Some people use running to detach themselves from the workaday world’s unceasing thrum. For those hours on the road or trail, they may forgo electronic communication in favor of communion with the natural world. That’s fine for them, I guess, but the reason millions of people prefer the electronic world to the natural one is because the electronic world has funny videos of cats playing the piano, and the natural world does not.

  The second reason running sucks is because it hurts. Sometimes it hurts your knees or your lower back or your feet. In my case, it hurts all of the above, plus my right shoulder, which seems like an odd place for running to hurt, but it is the location of my most frequent discomfort, due to my scoliosis.

  Whether or not I actually have scoliosis has been a matter of some confusion to me for more than thirty years. One day when I was in fifth grade, our entire class got called down to the nurse’s office for scoliosis tests. Per state law, all fifth graders were required to go through this drill. We lined up outside the nurse’s station and were brought inside one at a time. When it was my turn, she told me to bend over and touch my toes, which I did. As I stood, she ran her fingers over my spine and said, “You have scoliosis.”

  Oh no.

  Scoliosis was bad. I knew this because I had already read the Judy Blume book Deenie, about a girl with scoliosis who has to wear a back brace. She worries that the brace will crater her nascent love life. Who will ever feel her up over a back brace? It would be like going to second base with C-3PO. In the end, Deenie wears the brace and also finds love. Good news for her, but even at the age of ten, I understood that having scoliosis would brand me a freak. Even as it straightened my spine, I knew the brace would twist my social life into something ugly and deformed. Scoliosis was a death sentence. Worse, it was a girl’s disease.

  Girls are diagnosed with scoliosis at a ratio of 10:1. How had I, already pegged as somewhat less masculine than the other boys, developed a girl’s disease? I could see my already dim prospects for social success in middle school now winking out entirely.

  I left the nurse’s office with my diagnosis, eyes downcast, my future self being fitted for a cumbersome metal cage, all hopes of tongue-kissing forever lost. When I got home, I did not mention the exam to Mom. She would find out when the school called.

  But then, a mysterious thing happened. Or, rather, didn’t happen. The school never called. A day went by. Then a week. No telephone call. Nothing. They never even gave me one of those ominous sealed envelopes to bring home for signature. After a month, it became clear they never would. I felt thrilled and terrified. Should I say something? Should I alert Mom to my curvature of the spine, which, left untreated, would leave my vertebrae as tangled as our kitchen telephone cord? Or should I just keep my mouth shut, knowing I was trading the short-term gain of possibly making out with somebody against the future risk of becoming a troll who lives under a bridge? The decision was easy: I kept my mouth shut. Within a year, I stuck my tongue in Wendy Jamieson’s mouth. It was gross.

  I grew up. I do not live under a bridge. To my layman’s eye, my spine appears more or less straight, although I have noticed that my right shoulder does ride a bit higher than my left, which I assume is what produces that uncomfortable ache in my shoulder while running. I’ve done everything I can think of to do to lessen the pain, although the only thing I can think to do is roll my shoulder around a few times, which does little to offset my discomfort but does produce a series of satisfying clicks. How do you spell “s-c-o-l-i-o-s-i-s” in Morse code?

  Every now and again, I wonder what happened. Once the nurse gives you a scoliosis diagnosis, isn’t she supposed to follow up? Aren’t the school authorities supposed to sound the scoliosis bell? Call in one of those cool medevac helicopters? Was the nurse just messing with me that day? If so, I have to admit, that’s a pretty good practical joke.

  There are other pains associated with running. Many of them. This is normal. In fact, according to the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 70 percent of all runners can expect to become injured each year. Seventy percent! Those are Ebola numbers! Running is to the body what demolition derby is to the automobile. Why begin an activity that you can predict with near certainty will leave you unable to continue said activity in the not-too-distant future? It seems counterintuitive unless you consider that the injury will give you permission to stop.

  Yet, here I was, ready to start.

  Choosing running wasn’t entirely random. I’d been intrigued with distance running dating back to freshman year of high school, when I attended an informational meeting about joining the cross-country team, thinking I needed to boost my high school extracurricular résumé in anticipation of dropping out of college a couple years later.

  We were a shabby, sallow group at that sparsely attended meeting. None of us very athletic looking. None of us popular. The coach wore a saggy tracksuit, his mustache an unaccomplished strip of fuzz. He sat at the end of a lunch table and laid out his expectations for the upcoming season. These expectations had something to do with being “competitive,” although the way he said “competitive” made me think he expected us to do a lot of losing. Then he handed out mimeographed training schedules, detailing the running regimen we were to follow over the summer months. Running? Over the summer? I took one look at the ditto with its carefully prescribed mileage plans and muttered to myself a quiet “Fuck this.”

  You may ask, if I wasn’t prepared to, you know, run, why did I attend a meeting for the cross-country team? After all, running is pretty much all they do. I guess I thought the actual running part wouldn’t start until school resumed, when we would head out together, as one, on some crisp autumn day, perhaps in matching cardigan sweaters, maybe puffing from handsome meerschaum pipes as we jogged along. We would be like a pack of nattily attired zebras trotting the savanna. It never occurred to me that there would be summer running, which would conflict with my already-scheduled summer sleeping, summer television watching, and summer complaining that I had nothing to do. Seeing all that mileage charted in unyielding columns and rows—three miles one day, five the next—frightened me. I didn’t even know if I could run one mile, let alone multiples of the things. Once I factored in the possibility that a carload of football players might see me, panting along the road in short shorts, I became dissuaded. After all, a herd of zebras is majestic. A solitary zebra is prey. No, running would have to wait. Perhaps forever.

  Forever lasted until my freshman year of college at NYU, when my new roommate Dan suggested we take a run together. Dan was an amiable kid from upstate New York who had been on his high school track team, and who dreamed of becoming a foot doctor, which struck me as a bizarre career aspiration. What eighteen-year-old wants to be a podiatrist? Didn’t he know that feet are disgusting? Imagine having to use the word bunion on a daily basis. In the politest possible terms, I asked him how he came to choose that particular profession: “That’s fucking gross,” I said.

  Dan explained that he’d developed an interest in feet during his varsity running days, and by the way, would I be interested in taking a run with him? Dan ran all the time, sometimes twice a day. He often asked if I’d like to join him. I kept putting him off. “Maybe another time,” I’d say.

  Why didn’t I just say no, as in “no other time”? That would have ended his requests. I think part of me wanted to test my mettle against Dan, to see how I stacked up against my track star roommate. I didn’t expect to beat him in a footrace or anything, but I figured I could probably hold my own. Why did I think this? Because my arrogance is stronger than my brain.

  Finally, a couple months after we settled in together, I agreed to go for a run with Dan. I don’t even think I had anything to run in. Maybe some sweats, a T-shirt, and a pair of beat-up Converse. Dan had nylon shorts, tiny socks, running shoes. He looked like an athlete. I looked like a guy who recycles cans.

  We lived on the edge of Washington Square
Park, and our plan was to run through the park, up Fifth Avenue, cross somewhere in Midtown, then make our way back down Broadway toward home, a gentle and flat route, probably no more than two and a half or three miles. “No problem,” methought, imagining a brisk and tidy scamper through our fair city. I pictured us chatting and laughing as we zipped along the sidewalks, dodging pedestrians, jumping over taxicabs. We emerged from our dorm, windmilled our arms, stretched out our hammies, and took off.

  Dan set a murderous pace, closer to a sprint than a jog, leaving me exhausted by the time we crossed beneath the triumphal stone arch marking the park’s entrance. I stopped, bent over at the waist, lungs collapsed. We’d gone maybe two hundred yards.

  “Come on!” Dan barked, not even winded. He jogged in place, waiting for me to collect myself. Dan’s eyes were hard to read, but I saw something new in them, something approaching disgust. “Come on!” he said again, challenging me to continue.

  “I can’t,” I answered, wheezing.

  He gave me a final, withering appraisal before dashing up Fifth Avenue, his heels kicking high behind him. I watched him disappear into a thicket of slow-motion New Yorkers, knowing he was experiencing a primal triumph over me, the ancient dominance of alpha male over omega, the natural order of all things confirmed. After losing sight of Dan, I stood up and trudged back to our dorm room. Dan never again asked me to go running with him. There was no need. He had proven his point; he was the better man. We didn’t room together sophomore year.

  It would be another twenty years before I committed to running in a serious way, and only after I had eliminated every other physical activity I could think to do. If I could not swim or mountain bike or lift weights or play team sports or bull ride or luge, I would run. I knew running would hurt, and I knew it would suck, but I wanted it for me. Part of me also wanted it for Mom. As her mobility declined, my own sedentary lifestyle began to feel offensive. How could I justify spending my time lying on the couch for hours on end when I knew she would have given anything to be able to move about without hindrance? I resolved to get moving. At least one of us should stand on top of mountains, arms akimbo, surveying the world. And if mountains seemed too high, then perhaps hills. Or an oversized speed bump. At least one of us should be out of doors, planting foot in front of foot, pretending to enjoy nature. Our lives are short and growing shorter all the time. Maybe running could beat back death a little bit. Or, barring that, maybe it would at least make me yearn for death’s sweet release if it sucked as much as I thought it would.