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juntan
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« on: October 04, 2009, 11:19:49 PM » |
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There are two types of exercisers
Nury Vittachi
When it comes to exercise, you can divide people into two categories: spenders and non-spenders.
The first decides he wants to get fit and applies to the World Bank for a US$100 billion loan so he can buy vast amounts of equipment, a gym membership, designer sports shoes and hi-tech clothing.
The second just strips off his clothes and jogs out of the house.
My banker friend Sze Sze Tan, a Singaporean, is the first. I am the second.
*
Last weekend Sze Sze and I met for a morning jog along the coastline near my apartment.
Noticing the sun rising, I stripped to my ancient shorts (Jurassic era), singlet (Mesozoic era) and shoes (pre-Cambrian era), and stepped outside.
Sze Sze turned up in a taxi in a brand new skin-tight aerodynamic suit. He looked like a Marvel superhero, if you can imagine a small, bald, Singaporean banker Marvel superhero. (No, I can't either).
His costume had strange stripes which went from the outsides of his hips to the insides of his knees. I wondered if I should tell him that he had his "knickers in a twist". He explained: "These lines on my running gear follow the line of the iliotibial band, which are muscle fibers."
We set off, jogging along the coast. The two of us ran at the same pace, so I guess the hi-tech suit didn't make much difference.
As we started running, i observed three principles of male jogging politics. First, the appearance of female jogger instantly caused all male joggers to speed up, including those in the middle of having a massive heart attacks.
Second, any male who overtook a female immediately sped up. the pressure of a woman's gaze on a male jogger's back seemed to act as a tail wind. this was involuntary. at one stage, i had a painful stitch and desperately needed to stop, but I accidentaly overtook two women and my speed doubled.
Third, men perform better in clusters. The first runner, lets call him Ashok, spends 90 percent of the time thinking: " I really, really need to stop but my friend Huang seems to be having no trouble so Id better keep going" At the same time his buddy Huang is thinking: " I really, really want to stop but Ashok seems to be having no trouble so Id better keep going" At the end of the run, both ends up getting new set of records for themselves. The downside is that they are in intensive care. If there are between five and nine males, the process is intensified. If there are more than ten males, they will all soon be running close to the speed of light. It is actually illegal for more than 20 males to run together, as there competitiveness will cause them to curve the space-time, This would destroy the universe. Some people think this would be a bad thing. Personally, I could go either way.
*
Half an hour later, I estimated we were halfway along the route. He replied: "Actually, we've travelled 4.9 kilometers." He explained he was carrying a global positioning device which sent a pulse to a satellite and continuously recalculated how far we'd gone.
After another 15 minutes, I noticed he had something under his shirt. He flicked it up to reveal (above his chiseled stomach muscles) a device which measured his heartbeat. "It tells me that at the fastest point of the run, the slope we just did, I reached 99 per cent of my recommended heart rate," he said.
I didn't explain that I have a simpler way of finding out when I over-tax my heart. I drop dead.
*
We continued to pound the track until we reached our destination, a distant beach.
Coming to a halt, Sze Sze checked his over-sized wrist monitor. "We ran 9.8 kilometers in one hour, six minutes," he said. He clicked through a series of graphs on the screen. "That's my heart rate. That's my running speed. That's our distance. That's my cadence, or running rhythm. That's my average stride length. That's our elevation. And that's my score on the running index."
The machinery he was wearing, he explained, would send the data to his home computer which would analyze it for him.
*
On the way back, a woman jogger approached me. She pointed to her wrist monitor and said: "I can't work out how to make this thing tell me the time."
I looked at how far the sun had risen. "It's about eight-thirty," I said.
Then she noticed that my wrists were bare. "Where IS your watch, anyway?"
I pointed to the sun. "I keep it in the sky, where everyone can see it," I said. "It's lo-tech, but it works."
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