I swipe my student ID card and the Athletics Complex turnstiles unlock, spinning me through into the building. It’s one of the older buildings on campus, a brick made of bricks, ridged in a way only human constructs are. I make my way down the hall and turn into the gym. Row upon row of fitness machines fill the room wall to wall. There’s a section for weightlifting, a section for core exercises, and a row of treadmills. I pick out an empty one, set up the cleaner fluid, my water bottle, an album on my phone, unwind the clip to attach it to the bottom of my shirt, an entire little ritual. Then I select the five-kilometer run option from the dashboard, and the tread starts to turn under me.
I started doing five-k runs a while after my mom did. A few years back she started getting more into fitness and took the rest of the family along with her. Yoga and core were in one ear and out the other for me, but distance running managed to stick. It did not need a lot of gear, and I happened to live next to a great route. I could just step out of the house, run to the golf course just down the road, do a loop of that, and then take myself home. It was a straightforward way to get some exercise into my life. Then I moved across the entire North American continent for university, and that meant I lost my favorite loop. Eventually I found myself going to the gym, for the treadmills.
As the tread starts to move, the dashboard of the machine switches to showing three key pieces of data: time elapsed since starting the run, distance starting at five kilometers and counting down to zero, and the speed the treadmill is going at. It always starts at zero-point-five. I turn this up to six-point-seven. I look at the dashboard again four minutes later, it says I have covered half a kilometer. That’s a tenth of the distance. Half a kilometer every four minutes means I will cover five kilometers in forty minutes. Not acceptable. I turn up the speed to six-point-seven. I’ve covered a full kilometer by seven minutes. I could finish the run in around thirty-five minutes. Still unacceptable. The goal, the old standard, is sub-thirty minutes. I turn the speed up to seven.
I never knew how fast I was going on the old golf course loop, not with this kind of mechanical precision. I did know how far I was relative to the landmarks I had passed on the trail. The blackberry bushes, the duck pond, the steep hill, the really steep hill, the earth drums made by a local Kwakwaka’wakw artist. Each one a milestone of how far I had gone and how far I had left to go. An instinctual way to track progress, developed from the rhythms of turns and inclines ran through hundreds of times.
I look back to the dashboard again; it’s now been fifteen minutes, and I’m not at the halfway point yet. I turn up the speed again, the tread under me spins faster. Faster again, still faster, until the distance counter finally reaches zero. The timer reads at twenty-eight minutes, forty-eight seconds. The speed was at eight-point-six. I got under thirty minutes. Alright. The treadmill then shifts to a five minute cool down period. five minutes to walk and unwind my legs after pushing them for half an hour. There’s a couple different settings the counters on the dashboard can be set to, and with no need to go fast I switch the speed counter to a calorie counter. It says that I have burned three-hundred-eighty-seven calories this run. I keep that counter on the dashboard as I cool down, watching as it counts up to four-hundred-seven when the treadmill stops. I gather up all my stuff and make my way back to my dorm for a shower, and then off to another day of classes.
I head down into Wolfville while the sun starts to head down past the horizon. I’m feeling snackish, and need to get a pick-me-up. Browsing the aisles I find the energy drinks; my vice of choice. Turning the can over a single tab of the nutritional information strikes me: “Calories 5.” I burned four-hundred-seven calories running, drinking this would undo five of them. What about lunch at meal-hall today? How many calories was that? I’m supposed to burn the calories, right? Get rid of as many as I can, right? That’s why everything is a number on the dashboard, right? Burn more. Burn faster. Right?
I walk back to my dorm, missing the serenity of the trail.
