I was in The Crucible this morning with my Iron Maiden lifting weights. For me lifting weights is one of those things that clears my head and make the world seem a more tolerable place. No rubber coated weights here (unless they are bumper plates), cast iron plates that let you know you are not lifting correctly when they sound against each other as you knock out your reps.
In today’s world we are sadly missing one thing and that is the fear of things real rather than imagined. In short I feel the world would be a better place if we had more saber tooth tigers.
When we had saber tooth tigers there was the risk if one did not run fast enough or stand one’s ground with a mastodon femur one would get eaten. We were on the move, all the time. Day after day, week in, week out, year after year. The options were run, fight or become lunch.
Now we have devolved into a world where there is no passion to live. Sweater vest and Dockers attired fitness authorities have convinced us we must exercise all the time with caution. Never go hard two days in a row and never ever work the same body part two days in a row because something “bad” will happen. Let’s see – do you really think a saber tooth tiger would say, “OK I’ll wait until tomorrow to chase you down, would 10 am be OK?.” Or better yet, why don’t we imagine ourselves wearing a HR monitor and as we are being chased by a saber tooth tiger, stopping, turning and telling the tiger, “oops, sorry, gotta slow down, I can’t run any faster because I have exceeded my maximum HR as determined by 220 minus my age”. Crunch, crunch.
Diet has gone totally stupid as well! Lepus – like science nuns have convinced the world that a “sensible diet” and moderate and happy McExercise habits will produce a healthy population. Sure looks like that McNugget of advice is working well especially when we go into a grocery store and realize someone has abducted all the fit people! Hunter – gathers we are not, in our gas guzzling ESS-YEW-VEES, slurping down colas and burgers, eating endless bags of “baby carrots” (did you know that “baby carrots” are actually machined from grown-up carrots, a kind of Soylent Green vegetable world with Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson) and popping blue pills to get what should occur in our lives naturally. Stick a fork in Amerika and see if we are done, that’s what the saber tooth tigers are thinking right now!
Our fitness practice has become so far removed from what made us fit and let us survive thousands of years ago that it is no longer working. Standing on BOSU’s to workout when we can’t even first stand on the floor to correctly workout, attempting to replicate the landing forces of “running” on a hip sled, classes led by “instructors” who should consider placing a orange SMV triangle across the expanse beneath their “wasteland”, teaching bike classes outdoors in parking lots that look as though Woody Allen is using them as part of the filming of a remake of Sleeper, contrived and ridiculous buffoonery on wobbly boards to work the CORE…IF you were working on a whaling ship and your name was Ishmael.
Yes, science, please clone some saber tooth tigers. We would become a leaner world. Because that’s who would be left!
© CJ Ong, Jr. / The Crucible, 2010
Posted on October 6, 2010
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