Post-Elliptical

0 comments | Jun 25, 05:09 PM | best-of-earl | by Earl Creps

Visiting the East Bay (Berkeley/Oakland) area in April Jan and I connected with a young woman who lives there. With her enthusiastic help, we toured some of the region and started learning a few of the million things we need to know to live there.

Our new friend is heavily involved in fitness activities (especially biking) and so began to explain the Bay attitude toward things physical. In southern Cal, she opined, fitness is about vanity. One works out in that region to see and be seen, making exercise something like a self-inflicted form of cosmetic surgery (without that funny, my-face-is-about-to-explode look). In northern Cal, exercise is more about health, and is the natural concomitant to eating tofu, avoiding red meat, and driving a hybrid.

I’m not sure how accurate these observations are, but I am sure of two things: an unnerving number of people in the Bay region seem to take satisfaction in distancing themselves from their peers in the OC—the Other California. The divergent attitudes toward exercise are only one small example. The second thing we see a lot in the East Bay is the premium placed on being fit, especially among the young. The expectation is not that we will look like Olympic athletes, but we should at least look like we pass by the Golden Corral without stopping on the way to play tennis.

I can’t prove this, but I sense that the lower the percentage of my body fat, the better I will fit into Berkeley. After all, being thinner proves that I avoid consuming calories, calories that come from sources that require planet-warming doses of energy to produce. Exercise illustrates my concern for pushing that heart attack off into the future somewhere, thus holding down everyone’s health insurance premiums. Add thousands of media images that favor looking like a greyhound, and you get the idea.

So in the mornings I’m riding an elliptical machine almost every day. The main reason is really for my own health, but getting fit does not hurt me moving west. It is a small, but not insignificant part of contextualizing me for the mission. In the past I had thought of contextualization mainly as an attributes of our message (e.g., using narrative rather than propositions) or having to do with learning native customs (e.g., not asking for a bag when purchasing things in some Berkeley stores because bags use resources.)

The other day I gave a talk at a chapel service for the AoG headquarters personnel. I told them jokingly that, starting a church at this age, my eschatology was now post-elliptical. That is, if I ride that machine daily, I will live forever—or at least long enough to see our university church bear fruit.

In a recent conversation with another East Bay native with Berkeley roots, I learned that my new friend also exercised, using a treadmill religiously as his antidote for various metabolic diseases—his version of eternal life.

Everyone has an eschatology it seems. Some end at the grave, and others don’t.