Jason The Fool – Exercise is Bad. Enough Said.

Exercise Is Bad. Enough Said.

There’s a bike in my basement. A big, full-sized 10-speed bicycle with tires that still hold air and a clip that would hold a water bottle if I hadn’t lost it. There was a little dust on the bicycle, sure. But it wasn’t like it had a banana seat and a big flowery basket on the front. It was only a few years old.

And it was calling to me.

Summer’s an odd time when those highly respected in your life—sitcoms, doctors, your family, commercials, strange voices in your head—encourage you to do something as alien to today’s American as not going to the drive-through at McDonald’s. They want you to exercise.

At one point in my life, I exercised and I liked it. I had a weight bench, I could run three miles without once stopping for a beer, and I looked like one of those guys who doesn’t look like me.

Then things like my job, the riding lawnmower, and lunchtime naps got in the way. Now I get winded walking to the car. Hey, for your information, there are four steps on my porch. Four.

Walking into the basement, I heard a noise. A slight noise, but it was a noise. The bike was laughing at me. Buckling to the popular opinion that exercise is actually good for you, I pulled the laughing bicycle out of the basement and started riding it every morning.

I used to love bicycling. As a kid, I’d ride all over town and not break a sweat. Now, as I looked at yet another hill, its 45-degree incline hazy from all the sweat in my eyes, I realized two things were different than when I was a kid: 1) my hometown was flat, and this town was as flat as Machu Picchu; and 2) at 43, there’s a whole lot more wheezing involved in riding a bike than I remember. It must have something to do with the air quality.

OK, so I guess I actually realized three things—I now know why serious cyclists stand while they pedal. I always figured it had something to do with using your body weight to generate more speed. Nope, that’s just a side benefit. Cyclists stand because their butts hurt. Whenever you’re forced to drive slowly on a busy highway because you’re stuck behind a line of cyclists, don’t get mad. Just smile and wave as you pass, content in the knowledge that each one of these cyclists has hemorrhoids.

Later, rasping like a sailor in a downed sub, I lie on my living room floor wondering why it looked like the ceiling fan was giving me the finger. I would have been upright, but my knees were no longer up to the whole standing thing.

I wondered, in my pool of sweat, why people say it feels good to exercise. I didn’t feel good. Heck, I didn’t even feel good enough to feel bad. And then it came to me. Oh, it might have been because of the lack of oxygen to my brain, but it seemed clear enough at the time—exercise cannot be good for you. The sweat, the pain, the time wasted on walking tracks when you could have been eating fried chicken. Yeah. Something was wrong.

If exercise isn’t good for you, what else have sitcoms, doctors, your family, commercials, strange voices in your head, been lying about all these years? The dangers of red meat? Smoking? Sugar? Is it all a great conspiracy from the vitamin/Bowflex/exercise video cartels to keep the American public sweaty, sleepy, and exhausted? Yes. We can’t revolt if we can’t stand.

People, listen up—drop the yogurt, get off that treadmill, light up a Lucky Strike, and head to Dairy Queen. Then, after your burger and fries settle and you cuddle up to the dessert menu, I want you to tell me which feels better, a morning of searing muscle pain or chocolate-laced ice cream.

We’re on to you, Big Brother. Oh, yeah, we’re on to you, and we Americans will never be sweaty again.

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Jason Offutt is an award-winning humorist who also writes stuff scary enough you’ll wet your pants. You can get Jason’s books on the paranormal, “Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us,” and “Haunted Missouri: A Ghostly Guide to Missouri’s Most Spirited Spots,” at www.amazon.com.

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