Extreme Fitness

I don't do a lot of working out. As a kid I never played sports. Hockey was too cold. Soccer was boring. The chess team was too quiet. In high school I joined the swim team for a month and then quit when the Speedo-only rule came into affect.

Instead, I liked more casual, solitary activities like walking, hiking and biking in the parks. But when winter arrives, these pursuits are cut short. I tried working out at gyms. I'd hit the weights regularly for two weeks and then quit, never to return. I always felt awkward in those machines, as if I was in a some medieval torture chamber.

Don't get me wrong, I am not a slob. I enjoy being healthy and active. It makes me feel good.

I was recently given a free day pass to a new high-end gym called EXTREME Fitness. It boasted three floors of the latest equipment and a hot tub. It had kick boxing, yoga, Pilates, karate, muay Thai, aerobics, and dancing. Since I didn't have to pay a cent for all that, I packed up my bag and decided to try it out. I was feeling a bit lazy anyway.

Walking into EXTREME fitness, I take a staircase flanked by a cascading indoor waterfall and a high glass ceiling. Below, I can see people through on a pair of treadmills. I approach the counter; present my pass, and some ID.

When the lady learns that I have never been there before, she picks up the phone and says "new client at reception, new client at reception." "Wait here," she says. Thirty seconds later, a young man my age shows up in tear-away pants, a polo shirt, and a pair of sneakers. His name is Eddie. I've met these Eddie-types before. He offers me a tour, tells me all about the great things they have. He wants to know if i live nearby, how i heard about them, etc, etc. Eddie is a "customer service rep" which means he gets a commission if i sign up.

I take my towel and walk into the main room. To the left are the weight machines. To the right are the exercise machines. Everywhere I look, on every machine there are hundreds of people running, skiing, walking, and stair-climbing. There is constant roar and a whirr. Legs pumps. Legs cycle. I feel like I'm standing in the engine room of a submarine, watching the giant pistons turn a propeller. No one is talking to each other. Instead, people are listing to their music, their iPods, mumbling the lyrics between heavy breaths. There is a bank of 17 televisions hanging from the ceiling, each on a different channel. Oprah, Baseball, CNN, Friends, Outdoor Network, Much Music. One man is on a treadmill, slouched over the control panel, sweating dripping from his face. His eyes are closed; his legs are moving light speed. He is breathing loudly and singing to the music in his ears.

I get on a stair climber. It's in a row of 10 other stair climbers. It's the only machine available in the entire gym. Before I start climbing, I have to enter my weight, my age. It wants to know how far and for how long i want to go. As I start to move, I hear a loud creaking noise each time I lift my left foot.

"It's broken," shouts a woman beside me.

She jumps off of her climber and I take over her spot. Again, I enter my vital information and start climbing at a slow pace. I'm watching CNN. Soon, a woman steps onto the broken machine beside me.

"It's broken," I shout. She doesn't hear me. She's got her iPod on. "It's broken," I repeat. But she continues to enter her information. The loud creaking noise starts again, but she can't hear it. I give up and start working out.

As I started climbing and sweating, I started to wonder. People are here to work out, to work off fat, or just “burn some energy.” But we’ve spent our time in offices and at jobs that don’t involve much physical work. We consume food and get heavy. So what do we do? We go to gyms and get on machines that use electric energy to help us “burn energy.” We watch TV and listen to music to dull our senses, to the reality that we are in a windowless room. We don’t feel the wind in our faces, hop over any puddles. We don’t move more than three inches in twenty minutes. But we know how many calories we burned and our exact heart rate. And some are willing to pay $50 a month for this. What kind of exercise is this?

It’s extreme.

The Old Crab Apple Tree

This year we were going to cut the old crab apple tree down. Since we moved into this house in 1986, it's been a creaky old thing with blackened branches and rotten wood. As a kid I used to hide time capsules in the holes in the truck. As the years have passed, it's started to lean a little more, and the branches become more bare. Last year it did not sprout any and blossoms at all.

But this spring has brought the tree back to life. Its big pink-purple flowers have exploded on the branch with silent fury. The old tree has taken over the entire house. When I open my windows in the morning, the sweet perfume of the blossoms is everywhere. The morning and afternoon sun dye the rooms facing the tree with pink light. Bees hover over this world of plenty. When the wind blows, it plucks the petals from the tree and scatters them like confetti, some carry up with the wind, others sprinkle the ground below.

We've decided to put the saws back into the basement.

Now Close the Windows

By Robert Frost (1874–1963)

Now close the windows and hush all the fields;
If the trees must, let them silently toss;
No bird is singing now, and if there is,
Be it my loss.

It will be long ere the marshes resume,
It will be long ere the earliest bird:
So close the windows and not hear the wind,
But see all wind-stirred.

Insurance

I have been working for an insurance company recently. I am writing a PowerPoint sales presentation that they will use to sell "an ongoing relationship" to new clients.

Insurance has always puzzled me. We pay money to cover the unexpected things in life: car accidents, hurricanes, acts of god, lawsuits, and death.

All these companies have to ask is: "what if?" People answer by handing over a monthly cheque.

Insurance companies make billions of dollars every year.

Bank accounts full of fear.

Marc Robillard

Marc Robillard's Official website now launched.

www.marcrobillard.com

Amadou Diallo Sadio

In the winter of 2003, I traveled alone to Thailand for what was supposed to be a 3-month vacation. In the end, I remained in South East Asia for 6-months and traveled to 6 different countries.

When I first arrived in Bangkok, I noticed a small piece of paper tacked to a notice board in my ramshackle guesthouse. On it were names of men who were incarcerated in Thai prisons. A stranger pleaded with us tourists and backpackers to take the time out of our vacation to pay a visit to foreign nationals behind bars who did not have the benefit of having family or friends to support them.

Since I had a few days to spare, I jotted down the name of a certain Amadou Diallo Sadio and the directions to Bangkwang Prison. The next day I boarded a riverboat and meandered north of the city. There I found out that Bangkwang is a maximum security prison, a notorious hell-hole that bears a resemblance to medieval dungeons.

I handed over my passport, went through the security checks, and made my way to a courtyard. As I waited for Amadou, someone I never met, I heard the sound of chains dragging on the ground. I later learned that prisoners wear shackles at all times until they have been there for 3 years. A daily meal consists of a bowl of rice, maybe soup. There is chronic overcrowding, people people sleep on the floor toe-to-toe. AIDS, TB are constant problems. There is minimal healthcare, minimal care.

Amadou finally appeared in the courtyard behind a fenced off wall. Our eyes met, and I called out, "Amadou?" He smiled and sat down. We began chatting for an hour. He was from Nigeria, he was 24. He was serving a life sentence for smuggling drugs into Thailand. He was caught when he was 19. Although drug smuggling deserves punishment, he told me that he was poor, needed money to survive and local slickers offered him top dollar to do one run to Thailand.... his dreams would come true. But they didn't. Now he faces a life behind bars. A life sentence in Thailand usually means life.

Here is how I see it: Sure, drug smuggling is wrong. Prison is a fair sentence. But life in prision is a bit extreme, not to mention execution (if you are not lucky). But, he a human being. He needs someone to talk to. If you put someone in prison they don't need luxury, but they don't deserve unhuman conditions.

Since our first visit we have been in regular correspondence. He loves football and talking about politics. But he has asked me to ask people to write to him, to share their stories with him so he can feel connected to the world.

If you have time, if you can spare 15 minutes to write a letter, please do. What do you say in your letter? Simple. Just introduce yourself, who are you, what do you do? What do you think about. Get an envelope and write this address on it:

Amadou Diallo Sadio
Bangkwang Building #3
Nonthaburi Road
Nonthaburi
THAILAND
11000

If you are in Thailand, please pay him a visit. The directions are here: Directions

Night Club Poetics

On a given Saturday night, Toronto's Entertainment district attracts 50,000 people to the clubs and bars. People come dressed in their finest (or so they think), and wait in line to get into beat-thumping clubs. To capture the energy and the excitement of this place, Jules and I decided to have a competition: we had to write a 10-line poem that captures something about the atmosphere. We walked up and down Richmond Street for an hour, listening to people's conversations and watching them get their freak on. Here's my entry based on a a real incident outside a club:


Call for Back-Up

Hey what the fuck? What the fuck's going on?
Eddie and me are outside; Jimmy's face-down on the curbside.
Cops got him pinned down; crowd's gathered 'round.
Tina was by the bar; some dude started talking and went too far.
Sammy roughed him up, now he's cuffed up,
Blood's dripping from his face.
I told you we should'a stayed at Frankie's place.
Put down your beer, come get us outta here.
The paddy wagon's just pulled up.
Man, how did this night get so fucked up?