America is getting fatter. There’s nothing funny about that! Or is there? If you take a close look at the whole concept of exercise, it’s really pretty hilarious. Consider the health club; these places seem a bit goofy to me.

“Hey Bob, where you going?”
“Running”
“Why are you getting in your car then?”
“I’m going to the health club”
“I thought you were going running”
“I’m going to run at the health club”
“Why don’t you run to the health club, then you wouldn’t actually have to go there?”
“Because I run on the treadmill”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I have fitness goals”
“But aren’t treadmills those devices that go nowhere?”
“That’s how I’ll achieve my goals”
“By going nowhere?”

Sure, you can see this conversation happening. The problem with exercise is that it’s just not fun. Consider outdoor exercise, for example. Invariably you get rained or snowed on and risk getting hypothermia for most of the year unless you’re in a “warmer” climate area, in which case in the summer if you don’t finish your exercise by 5am before the sun gets too high, you’ll be out there with the road kill along the side of the road waiting for “buffalo jerky” guy to come along and turn you into more jerky profits at his roadside RV business.

Perhaps you like team sports and want to play in a league. Of course then you subject yourself to psychotic overzealous competitors screaming and threatening to take you out with an injury. Team sports are injuries waiting to happen. When you’re young, bending a finger backwards hurts but you shrug it off and the pain goes away after a day. When you’re older it’s a broken bone and six weeks with a cast forcing you to wipe your posterior with your left hand. That’s just wrong.

This brings us right back to the health clubs. Now I’ve been to these places. I’ve seen that Stair Master with its endless stairs that go nowhere. Of course, I opted for the Elevator Master instead…but alas, they haven’t invented that one yet. Why not? Elevator master would be brutal. You can’t talk in them and you must always avoid eye contact. That takes training! Nevertheless, I’m stuck with only Stair Master. Just the term ‘stair master’ confuses me. I thought it was for those that wanted to check out the hot bodies at the gym without getting caught but their management informed me that was a different type of “stair.”

I also checked out the treadmill with its endless walking that gets you nowhere. The Club Enforcement Officer (CEO) didn’t think kindly when I strapped the water ski rope to the front and got on with my inline skates and cranked it to full speed. Come on, where’s the enjoyment?

I did take great joy in those machines that have a “+” or a “–“so you can increase or decrease the weight of each rep right from your fingertips. I liked to do 20 curls with only 3 pounds and then just before I got off, I upped the weight to 180 pounds so the next guy could clearly see how buff and strong I was. I would then laugh at their inferiority as they had to set the weight back down to something mere mortal.

They wouldn’t let me stay on the indoor basketball court with my circus bounce boots because apparently there was no sitting on the basketball rims. There was also a rule against bouncing over people with them. I think they made that up on-the-fly though.

They didn’t like my motorized self winding machine that I attached to the indoor rock gym ropes so I could climb the hardest routes by having it just pull me up while I pretended to strain and groan through one armed pull ups from a hold the size of a nipple.

The CEO suspended my membership for several weeks for filling the squash court with those Chuck E. Cheese plastic balls and then diving in from the upper observatory.

Apparently there is also a limit to the amount of “guests” you can bring in to their outdoor hot tub and hosting unsanctioned “Wild On” parties there violates the membership bylaws in some way. Oh, and promoting it as Ladies Night is also a violation of some human resources fairness act they have.

Like I said, just where is the fun in fitness? No wonder America is getting fatter.