The Six Hundred Steps I Owed My Cardiologist

The card said six hundred. Not six hundred a day, which would have been an insult to my pride, but six hundred steps at a stretch before I was allowed to stop and let my heart settle. That was the deal my cardiologist wrote out for me in blue pen on the back of an appointment card after the stent went in, and I kept that card in my shirt pocket for months like it was a talisman. Six hundred steps. Then rest. Then, when my body agreed, a few hundred more.

I was fifty four when my chest decided to remind me it was in charge. I will spare you the drama except to say it was not a heart attack, quite, but it was the loud knock on the door before one, and the people in blue told me I had gotten very lucky and should treat the luck like it was rented, not owned. So I did. I stopped smoking, which was its own small war. And I was told to walk. Gently, boringly, endlessly. To walk the way you water a plant, a little and often, forever.

The problem with walking outside

The trouble was I live in a part of town where walking is not really a thing people do for its own sake. The pavements come and go. Half the blocks have no shade at all, and half have too much traffic, and there is one long stretch by the old mill where a dog the size of a small horse throws itself at a chain link fence every time anyone passes, and my new careful heart did not appreciate the surprise. In summer the heat made me quit early. In winter the ice gave me an honest excuse. I found that I could talk myself out of a walk in about eleven seconds flat, and I am a champion at it.

My wife, who is more sensible than me by a wide margin, watched me skip three days in a row and said what I already knew. She said, you are not going to do this if it depends on the weather and the dog and your mood. You need the walk to be waiting for you inside the house, so there is nothing to negotiate with.

She meant a treadmill. I resisted, because I had opinions about treadmills, mostly formed by watching my brother in law use his as a place to hang his dress shirts. But she was right and I knew she was right, and the compromise was that if we were going to do it, we were going to do it without spending a fortune on a machine that might become a clothes rack in a fortnight.

Turning the garage into a room with one purpose

We have a two car garage that has only ever held one car and a great deal of shame. Bicycles nobody rides. A canoe I bought during a phase. Boxes labelled in my mother's handwriting that I have been unable to open since she passed. I spent a whole weekend clearing one bay of it, and it was the first proper exercise I had done in months, hauling and sorting and driving three loads to the tip. By Sunday evening there was a clean rectangle of concrete with a plug point on the wall, and it looked, for the first time in years, like a place where a purpose could live.

Then came the machine itself. I did not want new. New treadmills, the ones with the screens that want a subscription and a login and your date of birth, felt like buying a spaceship to go to the corner shop. I wanted a plain belt and a motor and an incline, something a person could walk on. So I started looking at used treadmills for sale, which turned out to be a whole world I had never noticed, full of machines that other people had bought with big intentions and then surrendered to their own garages.

That was the funny part. Almost every second hand treadmill has the same story behind it, and it is my story too. Somebody buys it in January, uses it hard for a month, drapes a towel over it in March, and by the following January it is for sale with the phrase hardly used, which I have come to understand is the most honest and the most sad phrase in the whole market.

Learning what a good tired feels like

I found mine through a listing that had been up for a while, an older model with a solid deck and a motor that sounded, when I went to look at it, like it had a lot of quiet years left in it. The man selling it walked on it to show me it worked, and I could tell from the way he did it that it had genuinely hardly been used, that it had been his own good intention going quietly to seed. He helped me load it into the trailer and seemed relieved to see it go, the way you are relieved to hand off a plant you kept forgetting to water.

When you shop for used treadmills you learn to listen to the belt and to push down on the deck and to ask how old the motor is, and I learned all of that in about a week of being a beginner. Mostly I learned that a heavy old machine that was built to last is a better friend to a nervous heart than a light new one that was built to be sold.

The first day I walked on it I did four hundred steps and had to stop, and I felt every one of my fifty four years. But the card said six hundred and I was stubborn, and by the end of that first week I was clearing six hundred and standing there breathing, hand on the rail, feeling that particular good tired that I had forgotten existed. Not the tired of a bad night. The tired of a body that has done the thing it was built to do.

The machine that stopped being a clothes rack

I set two rules for myself in that garage, and they are the only two fitness rules I have ever actually kept. The first is that I put my shoes on before I let myself think about it, because thinking is where the walk goes to die. The second is that a towel is allowed on the rail only while I am on the belt, never after, because I have seen where the towel leads. It leads to a spaceship gathering dust.

It has been most of a year now. The card with the blue six hundred on it lives in a drawer, retired, because I passed six hundred so long ago that the number stopped mattering. Now I walk while I phone my daughter, while I listen to the cricket, while I let my mind untangle whatever the day knotted up. The garage smells of warm rubber and machine oil, which has somehow become the smell of me keeping a promise.

My brother in law asked me the other day where I got mine, because his own good intention has begun to sag on its frame, and he wants to sell it before it fully becomes furniture. I told him what I have told a few people now, that a plain honest used treadmill is one of the least glamorous and most useful things a person can own, and that the whole second hand market runs on people exactly like him, buying big, quitting quiet, and passing the machine along to the next hopeful heart.

Mine is not for sale. Mine is a room with one purpose now, and the purpose walks in every morning wearing yesterday's shoes.