The Beardy Workout

This morning, in the middle of a post-Christmas guilt-pang, I had my first experience of The Gym. I ran for 20 minutes on a treadmill, then did 2000m on a rowing machine. All the while there was this incessant, thumping bass track, throbbing away. Rather than being annoying, it was actually quite helpful, and for the first time I realised why people listen to it when they’re working out. According to the eggheads, the rhythm of the music mirrors the heartbeat and helps joggers “zone out”. This was something I initially thought was a big pile of Personal Trainer baloney, until I read about a man who zoned out so much that he “accidentally” ran off a 200-ft high cliff and plummeted to his death.

Now, I’m all for being distracted from the tedium of exercise. But when this sort of thing is going on, well, it’s just plain dangerous. Despite the snobbery about British holidays, our island is surrounded by hundreds of miles of picturesque beaches. Suppose I one day decide to listen to myself and go and investigate one of those aforesaid beaches? The last thing I want is a gaggle of goggle-eyed joggers raining down me as I take a relaxing stroll around Barafundle Bay.

We have to take steps to nip this sort of thing in the bud, before our beaches become clogged with bodies.

Particularly as there’s a wealth of purpose-built music out there for joggers to “zone out” to. In 2006 LCD Soundsystem made ‘45:33: Nike Original Run’, a “workout soundtrack” commissioned “to reward and push at good intervals of a run”.

A Good Idea, on the face of it, although for me personally, it didn’t really work; I couldn’t shake the image of James Murphy – who’s a bit of a tubby tum-tum, let’s be honest – leering over me like some sort of workout overlord. It was a bit like being set fashion targets by Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen (or, if you prefer, attending a seminar entitled ‘Fidelity & Professional Relationships; Two Hands To Hold On The Stairway To Success’ where the keynote speaker is John Terry). My head was so distracted by the about-arseness of all this, that if I went running listening to it, I never even got close to zoning out. Hence I never jogged off any cliffs, hence LCD Soundsystem saved my life. Ergo, ipso facto, quid pro quo, here’s the saviour: The Cerebral Workout!

Think about it. The Cerebral Workout could change the way people jog. Think of all those people stuck in gyms up and down the country, too scared of jogging straight across a motorway or right into the jaws of a combined harvester to venture outside for their exercise fix. What they need is some musical distraction that’s both enlightening AND life-preserving:

Band: Midlake
Cerebral song: ‘Children Of The Grounds’
Jogger’s reaction: “Wow… GASP… this… WHEEZE… bit…HUFF… is really… BLOW… uplifting…”
Result: Dodges barking dog and uncovered manhole, thus avoiding nasty fall.

Band: Silver Jews
Cerebral song: ‘Trains Across The Sea’, which contains the lyric “In twenty-seven years, I drunk fifty thousand beers”:
Jogger’s reaction: “I… PUFF… hope they were… GULP… light beers…”
Result: Hurdles roadworks, bounds over prostrate cyclist (who was listening to Empire Of The Sun, loser), punches erratic luggage-dragging pedestrian, just for the sheer hell of it.

Band: Low
Cerebral song: ‘Belarus’
Jogger’s reaction: “Blimey… PANT… that’s bleak…”
Result: Jogger resolves never to visit Eastern Europe, thus avoiding own unsolved murder at the hand of scarfaced cigarette smoking thugs.

You can keep the gym and its resident tight-shorted, muscle-bound, mirror-admirers.
I’d rather be a sofa-filling face-stuffing bum-scratcher with a brain, even if it means I never run again…