Through the Children's Gate

by Adam Gopnik

  The Motionless Mothers are in tune with their time. They have stopped running; they have stopped going to step class; they have almost stopped moving. And yet they bloom. Every morning they do their twelve yoga poses, rooted to a mat, saluting the sun and downing the dog, hardly stirring, just rocking back and forth in the lotus position, and then once a week they go to a cool, pure room and for twenty minutes do their Super Slow. They sit in the silent, cold room of the SuperSlow trainer—you cannot call it a gym; it lacks music, and all conviviality has been banished—and, eyes shut, breathing in short decisive pants, ten seconds up and ten seconds down, they lift great weights with their legs and arms and backs and torsos, hundreds of pounds for twenty uninterrupted minutes. They close their eyes and pant as they do it, the way they learned to do in childbirth. They have found a way to beat the odds, the genes, time itself: to be absolutely still and lift great weights very slowly.

  The Motionless Mothers can lift two and three hundred pounds and see the results in the shower and bedroom. They now have the bodies of Puerto Rican flyweight boxers, narrow waists and long taut biceps and elongated thigh muscles. They are wise. They have grasped intuitively that we live in a slower time, that this epoch is not a running epoch. The glittering and the gleaming, the brilliant of all kinds, have ceded their place to the self-knowing and short-winded, to the stubborn and simple and still. We have passed from the Age of the Gilded Hare into the Age of the Armored Tortoise. Slow and steady wins the race, because the hare is broke, or in prison, or hiding in fear in his hutch. Even the truly rabbity must pretend now to have been turtles all along.

  Within the new dispensation, the Motionless Mothers flourish motionlessly. Their backs are straight, their breath strong, their muscles eerily long and taut. They are, every inch of them, body and soul, in every sense, defined. Their husbands, merely running, are as vaguely defined as an acronym left over from the Cold War—SEATO, or MIRV—whose history no one can quite remember. What do they mean, exactly?

  There is something saintly about the SuperSlow trainer, the Running Fathers think when they go at last to see him—a gentle, powerful youth who hides his physique, delicately, within loose T-shirt and jeans, and who has a shy smile and a diffident manner. And yet the trainer has, as well, the shining patient persuasiveness of the convert, of the man who has seen and who knows. The old hollering, the old-style trainer's “You can do it,” or “Give me three more!,” are anathema to him. Instead, he stands beside the machine and whispers, instructs his student through the three or four repetitions that are all that is needed. He smiles gently, seeking nothing, never raising his voice. The weight goes up, comes back down to the pile, and then goes back up, ten counts up, ten counts down.

  “Okay. When you're ready. Just sneak out of there—crawl out, inch by inch. Hold it—now, slooow negative, coming back. Feel for the tap, don't look for it, feel for it, and then just sneaky-slow back out of there …”

  The strange thing is that the two-hundred-plus-pound weight, which feels immovable on first contact, moves. It nudges forward and then, through a swell of mixed pain and effort, really moves, and slips back down, and then moves again. Four times, no more; a minute and a half, no longer.

  The theory is impeccable, or at least persuasive. Muscles learn only from failure, like French schoolchildren, and they can be made to fail only by repeated stress slowly applied. The stress, if it is applied longer, cannot then really be stress. The mark of real stress is that the body cannot bear it long or often. The man in the gym rushing through his sets, the push-up artist doing his thousand push-ups—they are cruising in a comfort zone of their own creation, an imaginative illusion of their own conceit. They are making sweat, not muscle.

  “I'm going to stop you at a minute or half or failure,” the trainer whispers, “whichever comes first. We're hoping for failure, of course.” His hushed voice is the voice of the old game-show announcers whispering the password into the microphone behind the isolation booth, so the contestants cannot hear it. “Just inch out of there, sneaky-slow starting out—don't explode, don't throw it, just ease out, and hold it, and then slooowly back. ”

  There are six machines, no more, and the program really is over in twenty minutes, in a blaze of breath and pain. It takes place in the cold room, with windows overlooking the cold avenue. But the speed with which the workout ends is not presented as a gift on the other end of the pain—it is a limitation, a sign of the stupidity of the body. “If you destroy a muscle sufficiently, it has no choice except to make more muscle for the task. If you challenge it to its accustomed limits, which is what most people call exercise, it is just satisfied with itself.” The runner can see that muscle, complacent as a young painter of the 1980s, not really trying. “The beautiful thing is that if you stress it and then give it time to recover, when it recovers, it will recover stronger than before. If you did it more often, it would have less time to recover from the stress, so you'd be doing less strength building, not more.”

  What about running? the Running Fathers ask anxiously, don't you need aerobics to improve your lungs, couldn't the two things be complementary? The trainer is patient, humorous, kind, but absolute; running is not inadequate exercise—it is just not really exercise at all. It is recreation.

  “We-ell,” he explains, with the good-humored patience of the true convert, “why is it that they ask you your weight before you input your time on one of those stationary bikes? Okay: It's because they need to know how many calories you're going to burn just by sitting there, just naturally, without doing anything. Let's say that's you burn a hundred calories just while you're standing still or sleeping or thinking. Well, thirty minutes of running will burn about a hundred calories more—so if, let's say, you have an iced tea right after because of the thirst you've created by the ‘exercise’”—he beams with amusement as his voice brackets the word—“then you're back more deeply in debt than you were before! You're actually gaining calories. The same thing is true about running outdoors. I don't think it can harm you too much, but most of what we see”—he sounds like a doctor giving bad news kindly—“I mean, if it feels good and adds something to your life, by all means, keep running! But all you're doing is stressing your heart rather than training your muscles. Not every runner dies of an early heart attack. But I'm afraid that it's no accident that some of them do, and none of them …” His voice trails off.

  And the pain? “I have, well, I have this thing someone said to me once.” The young trainer blushes, frightened of seeming too aphoristic, wanting to share his wisdoms but not wanting to seem to show off. “It, well, it works for me in a strong way. It's just this—” He pauses and swallows and then recites earnestly: “ ‘Flee the pain and the pain will seek you; seek the pain and the pain will flee you.’ ”

  And the weird thing is that it does work, sort of. It is not that the pain really runs away; it is that if, at the moment when your knees are screaming, you simply turn into the scream, turn toward the pain and concentrate on it, seize it with your mind so that it engulfs you, then the pain becomes somehow a subject rather than an object—a thing outside yourself, gaining on you, but never quite catching up.

  Yet beneath the gentle voice and patient rational explanation of the SuperSlow trainer, one senses a hard Protestant rigor: Exercise is exercise, medicinal rather than recreational and absolute rather than open. The old gyms, the Running Fathers realize, were Catholic and Mediterranean in their spirit, a form of genial folk magic tied to a ritual practice. Everyone went, no one truly improved. Exercise from the seventies through the nineties, for a certain class of New Yorkers, was what communion and confession were for Italian peasants—not means but ends, not paths to heaven but the Godhead itself. If you “worked out,” you did not need to succeed at it—in fact, no one did succeed at it, really, no one seemed much thinner or stronger or (aside from a few gay men and professional athletes) truly altered. Considering the total number of hours spent in the gym, one would have expected a cit
y of Samsons, a metropolis of Babe Didriksons. Instead, people went on dieting, and the gym existed as the church does in a Sicilian village, as a gathering place, an intermediate institution, where fitness, like grace, would eventually descend on your head just from being there—and if it didn't, what of it, death was a long way off, and the body, like the Mediterranean God, was forgetful, largely forgiving. They were not running on a track or a path but in a village square, a piazza where people took a morning run in place of morning espresso.

  The new slow exercise is a form of Protestantism, and has the Protestant knack of combining a grim view of the meaninglessness of activity with a faith in the necessity of action. Grace is hard to come by, and you may never achieve it. Predestination, in the form of genes, applies nearly everywhere, to every wish and muscle. Yet you do it anyway, because good work, however painful, is your only hope, however faint.

  Beyond the trainer's charming and diffident help, the Running Father senses a grim core to the SuperSlow philosophy, a dark Geneva of the heart behind the smiling and helpful Unitarian facade. The Founder of the new slow exercise lives in Florida and performs his rites in some cool large strip mall. Every month or so, he writes a screed, never longer than a few pages, that is distributed, silently but significantly, at the front desk of the workout room.

  The Founder has contempt—not gentle condescension but furious, barely contained contempt—for runners and running, aerobics and aerobics classes, disdain for all the manners of the old exercise regimen, which pretended to have a point and were merely recreation. Even the words infuriate him; the concept of aerobics and aerobic exercise he treats with the cold hatred that Luther gave to the invocation of saints or to the selling of indulgences. “Aerobic activities are dangerous! Running is extremely high force activity,” he writes. “You cannot ‘train your wind.’ The lungs can always perform their job quite actively. Maximal oxygen uptake is 95.9 percent genetically determined. It is the muscles that actually perform work, and only the muscles can be trained. The ‘wind’ and ‘lungs’ and ‘aerobics’ have nothing to do with it. The enthusiastic aerobic dancer or jogger will pay the price for all that ‘healthy activity.’ If everyone in the U.S. immediately stopped performing the activities they pursued as ‘exercise ’ the collective health of the nation would improve dramatically,” he concludes, nailing his theses, not quite ninety-nine but counting, to the door of every false gym in the country.

  All that matters to the body (and, so the hidden corollary runs, to the soul, as well) is resistance. That is what the body is made to learn from, and all that it is made to learn from. “When you are dead, will your muscles still have resistance? Yes.” Death is the perfect exercise condition; and for a moment he sees the dead being exercised by their personal trainers. The Founder in Florida minces no words, makes no concessions to niceness. He warns repeatedly against something called Val Salva's maneuver, which sounds like an erotic act performed on Kim Novak or Angie Dickinson by a lounge singer from the Rat Pack era, but is in fact the act of holding your breath while working your muscles. (“Elderly people are commonly found dead of a stroke on the commode,” he writes mordantly, “as a result of the increase in BP as they Val Salva.”) Overweight? “The real problem with modern obesity is food abundance,” he writes flatly. Eat less.

  Above all, the Founder underlines the difference between exercise and recreation. “Elevated heart rate is not an indicator of exercise intensity, or value. It is quite possible to experience an elevated pulse, labored breathing, and profuse sweating without achieving valuable exercise. Intense emotional experiences commonly cause these symptoms without a shred of exercise benefit…. The ‘experts’ say that gentle low-intensity activities use the aerobic pathway to a greater degree than they use the anaerobic pathway. We agree with this statement completely and feel that it should be taken to its logical conclusion: The most ‘aerobic’ activity that a human being can engage in,” he concludes, “is sleeping.”

  The dream of the perfect tortoise seems to have penetrated even to the children. The boys lend their fathers their iPods and MP3s to go running with, ashamed of the old Discman, and their contents are stunning in their catholicity, their embracing universality. There are hundreds of melodies, countless songs, everything from Aerosmith to Al Yankovic. The new songs are wonderful but very much like the old songs: Donovan could have sung “Yellow,” the MC5 “American Idiot.”

  “Who do you like more, Green Day or Coldplay?” the father says, looking at the range of songs on the two-hundred-song list, thinking, He must have favorites.

  The boy shrugs. “They're both good. It's like asking who you like more, the Beatles or the Stones.” And the father is stunned, both by the serene wisdom of the answer and by its ease with history; the Beatles’ music is thirty years old, no, forty years old—any knowledge he would have had at that age, of music in the 1920s or ’30s, dearly won, teased out of old Ella Fitzgerald records.

  But the boy must be chasing something. In the past, to choose a band was to not choose some other band. Kids really hated things—stupidly, of course, since their hates extended to the very best things there were. (They hated sensitive singer-songwriters, and then these turned out to be Joni Mitchell, evergreen and blue.)

  “Isn't there anybody who you really hate? Britney Spears? Or what's-her-name, Avril Lavigne?” Avril Lavigne had been very big a year before, the Gidget of grunge, and, he senses, is no longer.

  But the boy shrugs. “She's okay, I guess. Some of her songs are okay, I guess. I just don't listen to the ones that aren't.” The iPod is a protective shell; by including everything, it eliminates the rooting interest—reduces albums brutally to playlists, eliminates choices as surely as the CD eliminated sides. You don't have to choose; you don't have to be enraged; you just glide right past the bad songs. Their attitude isn't a form of cool, and is a million miles from irony, more a form of sobered-up acceptance. The children live in comfort and understand fear, and they prepare their iPods for a dark age, like a medieval monk stocking his library with the classical essentials just before the vandals come. Even their idea of exercise is like their idea of music: a little of this, a little of that. They wear their Heelys, shoes with wheels that pop out from their soles, enabling them to walk and then run and then stutter-step and then suddenly and smoothly glide down the sidewalk in imperturbable cool, rolling right away, so that walking and running and stepping are all one fluid thing. They come to the edge of the reservoir and watch their fathers run, and smile benevolently, practicing their gliding on the edge of the grass. “Running is, like, so over, Dad,” the boy says when his father appears at last, and he glides away to school.

  Speed is over,” the Motionless Mothers say, mocking the trend writers but meaning it, too. “You should slow down. Give it up.”

  Books now appear every month in praise of slowness, volumes raining down. The new books inventory all the new kinds of self-improving slowness: They appear in praise of slow music, slow food, slow exercise, and slowed-down living, Slow Food and Bonjour Laziness and How to Be Idle and In Praise of Slowness. Tantric sex and seven-hour lamb are the pleasures of the moment, signs of virtue restored and sanity renewed. If you do everything more slowly—cook, make love, work out—your muscles will be larger, your food tastier, your children saner. You will, in short, have won the race. The tortoise is not merely wiser than the hare; he is actually faster, if the race course is long enough. Astonishingly, the authors seem unaware that they, too, are hamsters trapped on a wheel set by publishers, condemned to their contrarianism. (The rhetoric of slowness in the books is belied by the speediness of their appearance; the sweat almost glistens on their covers, like traces of the perspiration of their editors, racing to get the books on the shelves before the slow moment passes.)

  Some kinds of slowness are, the Running Fathers think, truly called slow: If you just stopped working, stopped moving, stopped paying the rent or the mortgage, the children's tuition, then yes, you would be slow,
off the track, standing still. But that kind of immobility is impossible, and the slowness that takes its place isn't really slow at all. If you set out to braise a leg of lamb, or to make a “classic” peasant pork stew, you are busy all day long. There are lardons to crisp and fat to skim and a hundred small slow decisions to make. Slow cooking offers no escape from the relentlessness of modern life; it just introduces a new and modish form of relentlessness.

  Fast and slow, truth be told, will always catch up with each other. Anytime one attempts to insert speed into any system, slowness results. The traffic jam was the old, last-century proof of this truth. Airplane travel, so wonderfully speedy—imagine hinting to Ben Franklin that the day would come when you could get to Paris in seven hours!—becomes enbarnacled by an apparatus so slow (the freeway, the check-in, the security lines, the long drive through the congealing airport traffic on the other side) that the primary experience of air travel is its excruciating tedium.

  But anytime you attempt to insert slowness into the system, life speeds up somewhere else. In aristocratic societies, it was possible at least to transfer the energy throughout a society: The leisure of Madame de Pompadour was supported by the desperate busyness of her servants. In modern bourgeois societies, though, where we are our own servants, any speed added produces slowness somewhere else in your own life—the equilibrium of slow and fast has become internalized in single bodies, a single consciousness. The balance that used to seek and spread across a civilization is now centered in a single soul; any slowness inserted to calm you down produces speed that wears you out. The economy of fast and slow, no matter how you try to adjust it, will always remain in perfect balance.