Elitist exercise

There is a park near an upscale neighborhood where my mom and I like to walk around and rate how wealthy each jogger looks on a 10-point scale.\nThe people who jog at this park are polished to perfection, from their designer sunglasses and purses to their preppy polo shirts and sweatbands. Every time my mom and I pass one of these exotic specimens, we politely say hello and then whisper under our breath the number we have scored them. We then average our two numbers to determine their final tally. If someone is walking a dog that has better hygiene than we do, that person is automatically in the seven-and-up range. Poodles wearing cashmere sweaters and toddlers with pedicures earn their owners an automatic 10.\nElitist exercise behavior does not exist only at this particular park. In the comfort of the air-conditioned SRSC, girls wear eyeliner and talk on their cell phones while riding stationary bikes and flipping through Vogue. We all sip Dasani purified water and listen to pop songs on pastel-colored iPods.\nI’m as guilty of this behavior as anyone, but it always leaves me feeling cheap. Half the point of exercise is that it’s supposed to make you feel kind of gross and earthy.\nWhen I think about what exercise is supposed to feel like, I think about the high school summers I spent at band camp. (There’s no witty innuendo you can use here that I haven’t heard before, so don’t bother.) During warm-ups we did arm circles, where you had to hold your arms straight out in the air and rotate them at a steady pace until you were in so much pain that you started seeing things that weren’t there, like insects or sometimes dinosaurs. If you brought your arms down the whole band had to do more, so as encouragement the band director would run around shouting “The pain is all in your head!” \nDrills would continue all day under the blistering heat of the sun. If I ever got a spare moment, I used it to rub dirt out of my skin with innovative techniques that I perfected and passed along to a few other privileged members of the brass section. Water breaks were brief but hard-earned. You were allotted the contents of one small Styrofoam cup that you could either dump on your head for relief or gulp down for hydration. If you wanted more to drink, you were free to lick the salty sweat off your own flesh.\nI can’t even imagine what it’s like for people who play real sports. But the point is there is nothing pretty or pampered about that kind of workout. I’d go home feeling and smelling more like a piece of rotting deli meat than a human being. But that’s how I knew it was worth it; that’s what made the exercise so exhilarating.\nEyeliner, cell phones, purified water and poodles are not part of a true workout. Exercise is meant to be a little bit nasty.