A sloth’s guide to exercise

When I was talking to my good friend Julie R. last week, she told me with great disappointment that she had a terrible cold and had to scale her cardio exercise session “down” to 30 minutes. Then she and I immediately laughed, because we both know that getting up to 30 minutes of cardio is my never-ending goal.

I am cursed blessed with a group of friends – none of them spring chickens, mind you – who all seem to be paragons of physical fitness. The aforementioned Julie R. runs marathons. Jill and Barb climbed Mt. Everest and, when that got a bit tedious, trekked around Machu Picchu. Michele works out with kettlebells (or, as I like to call them, “rotator cuff rippers”). Ron hikes the Pacific Crest Trail. Annabelle is a national champion in velodrome cycling. M.L. does triathlons.

It probably goes without saying that none of those things is in my repertoire.

For the most part, I hate exercising, unless it involves playing competitive sports. I used to be a decent athlete, but nowadays my sports endeavors typically end in a torn muscle, a broken bone, or some combination of the two. So I have settled on exercising as an individual, because of course it’s good for your heart and helps keep your bones from disintegrating and blah-dee-dee blah blah blah.

I have a feeling that some of my readers (outside of my close circle of superjock friends) might feel the way I do, so I would like to offer my surefire method of starting an exercise program and sticking with it. My method involves just three components:

1. Exercising for only 30 seconds;
2. Getting into a furious lather over newstalk; and
3. Hoping that Max Weinberg gets food poisoning.

Follow the “30 Seconds” program

The most critical element of the Bocciardi exercise program is exercising for only 30 seconds. Now, I know you’re all assuming that I’m just trying to be funny, but my closest friends and family members can verify that what I am about to say is 100 percent true.

It seems that every year or two something happens that completely derails my exercise program. I shatter a bone, rip a ligament, get sick, experience some kind of life interruption, or just plain get lazy. And as many of you know, it is really, really hard to start up exercising once you have stopped. It is painful. The lungs burn, the legs ache, the heart labors, and it’s simply a boatload of misery. So I have found that the only thing that makes me start up again is knowing that I have to do it for only 30 seconds.

My cardio machine of choice is the elliptical, and what I do is exercise for 30 seconds on my first day back, 60 seconds the next time, and so on. Of course, increasing by only 30 seconds per outing means that it takes 60 outings to work my way up to my 30-minute max, but that’s fine with me. (And if I get on the elliptical three days a week, that means it will take five months to reach my half-hour max – about enough time for me to tear another ligament and have to start all over again.)

Knowing that I have to suffer for only 30 seconds that first day is a sublime motivator. And I really get into it. I pull on my sweats, grab some Gatorade, and even make sure I wear my sports bra.

 

Get infuriated over newstalk

My ideal sports regimen involves using the elliptical on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, I work out for 20–30 minutes on our hybrid weight machine in our downstairs “guest room.”

I discovered many years ago that listening to newstalk radio in the car always makes me furious, which can really make a lengthy trip zip by in seemingly no time at all. If a 22-year-old know-it-all starts ranting about how future Hall of Fame coach Bruce Bochy doesn’t know what he’s doing and should have replaced a pitcher, the time you spend sitting in rush-hour traffic will pass swiftly as your disgust rises. Or if one of those “survivalists” calls in from his bunker to offer his completely uninformed opinion about the Constitution, your three-hour trip will evaporate while you seethe.

So, while I spend time downstairs on the weight machine, injuring myself in small increments (until one day: SPROIIIIIIING!), I watch cable news on television. I can simultaneously do a shoulder press and shriek at the TV, “Why on earth do you still have a job, Wolf??! Is no one else sick to death of your breathless pettifogging?”

Not only does that pass the time, but my blood boils, my heart pumps like a locomotive, and my theory is that it enables me to lift more weight!

 

Imagine Max Weinberg with salmonella

While I’m on the elliptical in the garage, though, I don’t watch television. What I do is put one of my so-last-millennium CDs into my so-last-millennium living room CD player and listen via wireless headphones.

(Of course, as you might imagine, when I’m exercising for only 30 seconds, I don’t get to hear very much of a song.)

Dealing with the pain and misery of cardio exercise, however, requires that I do something more than just listen to music. So I fantasize.

When I was a little girl, my favorite fantasy was that I was a wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers. As I got a little older, I had a dream (now legendary among my circle of friends) about Fess Parker and me that involved no clothing whatsoever except for coonskin caps. It was rather wonderful, but I digress.

For the last two years I’ve slowly been going through my entire Springsteen CD collection, which includes studio recordings, EPs, and a raft of bootlegs. My objective is to catalog all of them in a detailed database and to rate each studio and live performance according to the Bocciardi ratings system. This means hundreds of hours listening to Bruce while I work out on the elliptical.

What I do for the entire 30 minutes – or seconds, as the case may be – is fantasize that I am playing drums in the E Street Band behind Bruce at a live concert. In my scenario, I’ve been conscripted to play, on the spur of the moment, because regular drummer Max Weinberg is suddenly stricken and unable to take the stage.

Rock fans, this is where we absolutely must discuss the fact that this did happen to the world’s luckiest teenager. And it occurred right here in Daly City.

On November 20, 1973, the Who – one of the greatest bands of all time – were (or is it “was”?) in the middle of a show at the Cow Palace when drummer Keith Moon passed out cold, allegedly from a combination of tranquilizers and brandy. After being revived offstage with a shower and a cortisone injection, he came back out and continued drumming, seemingly back to normal. But during the very next song he passed out again, and this time he meant it.

Miraculously, some of this was filmed and has been posted on YouTube. You can see Keith slumped over at about 8:22, right after “Magic Bus” ends.

https://youtu.be/aIjH9OU2JKw

Guitarist Pete Townshend then looked up into the crowd and asked whether there were any good drummers who could come down and help them out. Holy nirvana! This doesn’t even happen in the movies!

Nineteen-year-old Thomas Scot Halpin, a fan who’d arrived 13 hours early with a friend to see the legendary band, was standing on the floor off to the side of the stage. When Townshend made his plea, the friend dragged Scot over to a security guard and insisted that he knew all the material and would be the perfect person for the job. Concert promoter Bill Graham came over to check out what he thought was a security issue, but he ended up recruiting Scot for the job. So Halpin found himself onstage, where someone gave him a shot of brandy to calm his nerves and he proceeded to spend the next few minutes of his life living out a dream that afterwards he could barely remember because of the adrenaline and the unreality of it all.

The band did three more songs, two of which were classic blues numbers. The third song was a Who tune called “Naked Eye” that had been played live but had not been released on a studio album, so I don’t know whether Halpin had even heard it before.

Although he had not touched a drumstick in a year, and Townshend sometimes had to help him through the tempo changes, I think the teenage drummer did a great job:

https://youtu.be/X5ZGlVY5rg4

At the end, Halpin takes a bow with the band and looks like the happiest man alive.

It gives me chills to watch it.

My fantasy, as I mentioned, is similar. But there is no way Max Weinberg would ever be under the influence at a concert (or probably anywhere). For a long time my scenario involved his having a heart attack, but after many months it occurred to me that if Max had a coronary before a show, Springsteen would not blithely carry on with the concert as if nothing had happened! So I decided that he needed to suddenly get a raging case of food poisoning. Nothing too serious, of course, but enough to keep him indisposed for a few hours. Meanwhile, I would be dragged up on stage to finish the show.

My appearance would be, of course, triumphant.

And that’s how you can get through your new exercise plan for 2017.

You’re welcome.