Endurance
work. Fat burning. It is a slow, tedious task- one that I could
certifably not be arsed with until recently, when I decided it might
be good to bring a book to the gym to get through the monotony of it.
After the questionable success of my reading-while-cycling thing I
tried a month back (various posts on the right, see “Reading and
Working Out”) I decide to give reading and walking a shot.
Since
November I've been dipping in and out of Monty Python's Flying
Circus: Just the Words, a back-to-back compilation of the screenplays
of the zany 70s TV show. What better book is there for a zany task of
reading on a treadmill?
I
used a treadmill at the back of the gym for this task- away from the
speakers and right in front of the floor-to-ceiling window where I
could get plenty of daylight. If you're going to be indoors for a
substantial part of the day, you might as well get what seratonin you
can while you're there. It will aid concentration, and I found that pages lit by sunlight
were easier to read than pages lit by the gym's ceiling lights after
dusk.
The
movement of walking is a very up-down motion- your body level raises
when your legs are together and dips when your legs are apart. This
movement causes the text to go squiggly before your eyes, meaning it
takes a few minutes for your vision to adapt to the rhythm of
walking. Concentrating can be difficult- especially when the content
features 18th-century kings headbutting each other.
Also,
because your eyes are fixed to the page, you aren't looking at the
horizon or the features of the room. This causes you to lose your
balance slightly, so you start to walk with your feet slightly wider
apart, almost in a shat-yourself waddle.
As
for the pace, I found 6kph practical and 5kph more so (predictably).
I couldn't concentrate at 7kph. If you're taller than 173 cm (5'8 for
those still catching up), you might manage at a slightly higher speed
being able to walk with a wider stride.
I
walked for 1 hour 50 mins (until the gym closed) on day 1- and
started this straight after 45 mins of short cardio and weights. On
day 2 I did the same, reading for 1 hour 15 mins. In order to burn
fat, in theory, you need to work out for 90 minutes first. So, I
fat-burned for 65 minutes on day 1 and 30 minutes on day 2. Yet I
STILL have no six pack. Bastard.
Do
long cardio and you notice certain things that strength training
doesn't inflict on you- an intense tiredness, for one thing, along
with concentration difficulties, isolation and pain in the feet. This
will be more so if your laces aren't tied tight/slack enough.
An
interesting, if slightly odd, task. The task was made odder by the
Pythons' surrealist comedy sketches, of which I have now read the
scripts to EVERY ONE. I actually LOLd at quite a few of the
depictions. Some were classics (the “argument clinic” is
something we can all relate to), others forgettable. It's the kind of
thing that's easiest to read in small portions- the only people who
can read this kind of silliness for extended periods are probably
loons themselves.
Cough.
But
what struck me reading this was that they were using a fairly
traditional method to develop these comedy ideas.
I
suspect that John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman,
Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle were well-versed in surrealist “cut-up”
techniques. This old art is performed by writing down as many ideas
and scenarios as you can, cutting these sheets of paper into strips
and shuffling them together to make a mish-mash of characters, places
and happenings. You then look through these ideas and try to form
scenarios from images that wouldn't normally go together, like
vikings celebrating Spam in a village tea-room, or a WWII RAF pilot
called Pip, “the half-parrot, half man, half-woman, three-quarter
badger, ex-bigamist negro preacher, for whom banjo-playing was very
difficult.”
I'm
not an expert in these techniques, but I did go to two interesting
workshops on cut-up a few months ago. The writeups are here, coupled
with poems I wrote at each one:
Outcome:
reading and cycling was MUCH easier. Also, taking 5 months to read a
book is ridiculous. But in all fairness, it was a ridiculous book.
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