“Fitness Buffs Sweat It Out At Home” - WSJ to the rescue. Or so I thought. “Cut off from gyms and even our favorite trails by government order, people are scrambling to buy exercise equipment to stay fit and sane and devising new ways to work out at home.” I imagined all the clever ways people had found to use what they had at home to keep body and spirit healthy, but the list mostly involved frantic shopping. Nordic Treadmills are being hoarded like toilet paper. A customer decided one wasn’t enough and to the delight of the store owner and the frustration of other shoppers, bought six more. Peloton is doing a bang-up business with “contactless delivery service” to maintain social distancing. Even the lowly dumbbells are hot sellers. One frantic NYC customer sent an Uber driver on a four-hour round trip to a shop in Delaware to pick up the last six pairs.
To be fair, there were some workout- work-arounds that used what was already at hand. A desk chair stood in for a ballet bar. Boxed broth was a decent proxy for two pound weights. My solution to the pool, the gym and the yoga studio all being shuttered is to use the “step climber” at the end of my hall. A dozen times up and down the five flights makes for 1000 steps each way. The dumbbells I used to hate are now prized. My low tech approach will get no awards in the consumer spending category, but in the Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do, or Do Without department, it feels like a winner.
Maybe it’s a bit of sour grapes. I’d love to have a Peloton right now. But as soon as our self or otherwise- imposed quarantining ends, I know I’ll be glad I don’t. When the pool, the gym and the yoga studio reopen, I’ll rejoice in collective sweating rather than sweating solo in The Age of Corona.