See the machine.
Squat and horizontal. A rectangular lectern with arm rails. See the belt—motorized sheet of rubber, a squealing strip at the device’s heart—allowing forward motion without going anywhere.
This is the treadmill, most famous of cardio gym equipment. It’s outlasted every fad of modern exercise. The Stairmasters, the rowing machines, the Bowflexes and Gazelles, all expelled in the treadmill’s wake. And it will persist, lingering long after the Peloton bike is relegated to the dustbin of history and replaced by the next metaversal nightmare.
After all that will remain the treadmill: heavy and stolid, ceaselessly churning.
Despite variations of quality and thousands of iterations and innovations, the treadmill experience has remained consistent.
Rear entry. Several seconds of orientation to the chest-high interface. A few probing prods with a forefinger. And then away we don't go.
The belt slurches into gear. You begin a shuffled tip-toe into movement; body and machine tune to one another.
It takes a few moments and modifications. You harmonize yourself to the mill, tweaking the speed to match your stride with slight adjustments as you warm to the idiosyncrasies of the device. And then you’re in the rhythm, pounding, doh, doh, doh. You are become the world’s loudest metronome—human bulk thudding against plastic.
We now do this by choice, but treadmills used to be a form of labor.
The hint is in that second syllable. Today’s treadmills are echoes of older agricultural and industrial production when muscle and sinew were an economy’s main source of power. The earliest civilizations harnessed humans and animals to steadily push against a bar that cranked a shaft to lift buckets of water from a well, to thresh wheat, or to grind grain.
With modernity, the treadmill was redeployed for punitive purposes.
In 1818 an English engineer proposed placing prisoners on treadmills as treatment for idleness and to generate productive work. Convicts were forced to trod on a series of steps attached to a circular frame of wood and iron. As they stepped, their body's weight caused the mill to turn, cranking whatever device was attached and compelling the inmate to keep taking steps.
Shifts could last up to six hours—15 minutes on, 5 minutes off, essentially a long interval workout. Prisoners climbed up to 8,500 feet in a day.
This punishment was codified by British Parliament in the Prison Act of 1865, which legislated that every male prisoner sentenced to hard labor was required to spend three months in “labour of the first class,” which usually meant the treadmill. Such punishment lasted into the twentieth century.
In between then and now is an enormity of cultural and social history.
The western world developed new forms of carceral discipline to replace physical punishment. Anxious state governments worked to make their populations fit to wage wars and build empires. New medical practices leveled deeper examinations into the body. A post-world-war boom led to a wave of consumer appliances and gadgets. All this and much more led to the eventual migration of the treadmill from the prison and workhouse to the fitness center and home gym.
The most time I spent on a treadmill was in the Recreational Sports Facility at UC Berkeley.
An annex of gyms connected to the basketball arena, the RSF wedged its aerobic equipment along the walls of a main atrium, an open and airy space leading to various weight rooms, courts, and group exercise spaces.
I preferred a Woodway facing a salmon-colored wall. I visited it once or twice a week during a period of intensive trail racing so I could run controlled workouts of uphill intervals. Arriving early to beat the crowds of undergrads, I plodded through 10-20 minute intervals of inclines between 8-15% gradients.
During the workouts, I entered that lactic-threshold headspace—a cocoon of effort, exhalation, and EDM music. Ears plugged with Spotify dance tracks, eyes fixed somewhere between wall and machine, gazing at nothing in particular in that foreshortened space of painful concentration.
Week after week. The work of discipline, once meant for prisoners and idlers, done quite voluntarily upon myself.
Odd that a tool, designed for work and punishment, is now used quite willingly. Indeed, we pay for the privilege.
Treadmills reveal deeper imperatives: to work toward physical ability beyond what is needed for everyday life, to train for status-enhancing achievements, to maintain a certain figure despite the the excesses of industrial food systems, to ward off anxieties and depression.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault observed this extension of punitive techniques into our daily routines. It led him to consider the prison as a metaphor for the constrictions of modern life.
Foucault considered the “panopticon,” an architectural proposal from the 19th-century British philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, as emblematic of modern life.
The panopticon is a ring-shaped prison of many floors consisting of continuous rows of cells. Each cell has two windows. One window faces outward to let in light and the other looks inward toward an inner courtyard, allowing observation of the person in the cell. At the center of the courtyard is a watchtower with windows facing in all directions such that the watchman can see into every cell of the prison but can’t be seen themselves.
The prisoners (or students, or workers) in the panopticon find themselves in a psychological state in which surveillance must be presumed. Knowing they could be under observation at any moment, those in the panopticon act accordingly. This was, Bentham observed optimistically, a better, more humane version of the treadmill, one that worked upon the soul and mind instead of the body. He described it as “a mill for grinding rogues honest.”
Foucault was less impressed. He argued the panopticon was emblematic of all modernity. Alone, alienated, isolated from one another, “so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone,” he writes in Discipline and Punish. Bentham’s statement should be reversed: honest rogues grind themselves upon the mill.
Our lives sometimes seem like a panoptic treadmill.
We spend our days, for the most part, in lockstep routines, disciplined and orderly. Without any physical enforcement mechanism, we arise and dutifully step onto our treadmills or spin bikes or morning preparations before making regimented commutes to our occupations.
We work, without much complaint, under the eyes of management or keeping our Slack dots green. Productive, quiet, hard working. And then as the sun sets, we shuffle back to our pods. We heat protein and carbs before watching a modicum of distraction shining from a plastic screen and putting ourselves to rest.
And then we wake and do it again. Day after day, after day. Life, a treadmill of our own choosing. Indeed, it’s treadmills all the way down.
The weekly run
Breakfast Club's weekly run meets every Thursday morning in the Oakland hills for an 8-mile run.
When and Where: Thursday, 6:30am at Lake Temescal
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace; routes include a few hundred feet of climbing. See route on Strava
Parking: lots are closed early in the morning, but street parking along Broadway is plentiful just beyond the park's northern entrance. Be careful with belongings as theft is common.
Meeting spot: north side of the lake at the toilets near the northern parking lot. The group runs a clockwise loop around the lake before heading out of the park.
What I've been reading
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. I started reading this history of the people between Germany and Russia last weekend and could not put it down. After the first world war, the region was a vast, multi-ethnic area, shaped by multiple empires over the centuries. By 1945, 14 million people had been murdered and the region destabilized in ways that continue shape our politics, including Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine. Highly recommend given the current events of today.
We Have Been Harmonized by Kai Strittmatter. Part of a collection of books about data, privacy, and surveillance I’m reading for a project at work, this review highlights how identity technologies have enabled the exponential growth of China’s surveillance state, giving new life to the Communist Party.
“Boogie Nights”, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson turned 25 this year. I’d never seen it until last month and have already re-watched. An incredible, dazzling, and hilarious story about the pornography industry in the San Fernando Valley of the 1970s and 1980s. Beautifully written and performed, it’s really about a family (of sorts) that coalesces during the Golden Age of Porn. Features one of the greatest steadicam opening shots in cinema.
The story of the world’s greatest stone skippers. Kurt Steiner, who’s spent much of his life skimming stones across water, was profiled this week in Outside Magazine. Watch him make an epic toss at ESPN.
Watch Eliud Kipchoge’s bottle man, Claus-Henning Schulke, nail every handoff. A sheer delight. (Twitter)
Tweets of the week
Parting thought
“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”
- Michel Foucault
That’s all for this week.
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