Elliptical - 2028

Just a week shy of my 83^rd birthday now.  

It seems like a hundred years since we went through Great Depression II in 2009.  It is good to have witnessed the re-birth of a self sufficient United States.  That amazing President, Barack Obama pulled off the most remarkable recovery and he did it by teaming up an eclectic 'Wild Bunch' of politicians.  He turned them around from fighting cats that were at one time slashing at one another like Jack the Ripper.  He put them on the same course, gave them a vision and blammo!!!  Here we are.  We have paid off our 35 trillion dollar national debt and therein freed our kids to create their own prosperity.

So now we have an openly gay President, Rachel Maddow.  So much for “don’t ask, don’t tell” right?! Rachel is an Oxford educated Rhodes Scholar and the first of her kind to move from newscaster to Senator to President.  Who would have thought?! I will tell you she is a pistol of the first degree.  She has us on a steady track of retaining human values while dealing with world population growth problems that stagger the imagination.  I am betting that will be the defining point of her Presidency.  I am also betting she will succeed. 

But I am missing the point of this story… my elliptical machine.   Well, it’s not exactly mine.  It is one of several at the Del Norte club, our neighborhood gym.  There are a half dozen of these along with an equal number of stair steppers, treadmills and in-place bicycles (all cardio machines) along with the usual assortment of weight machines.

About ten years ago, contractors laid pipe perpendicular to our two rows of new cardio machines.  The machines were then all configured to capture the energy produced by our workouts.  It worked great and it wasn’t long before we were generating enough electricity to completely power our club.  We even generated enough excess to help replenish our community electrical reserves and help power buildings that had no self sustaining ‘human’ generators.  We could also apply excess electrical credit to our own homes!  

It all worked so well that it within five years it was hard to find a home or gym that wasn’t similarly wired.  Even plug-in autos would pull up to a gym for a quick charge.  We all got so ‘charged’ up about the new technology, we were spending twice as much time on our machines.  I even dropped enough weight to drag my old Air Force blue suit out of the closet and watch it sort of hang off me.  I’ll tell you, this was happening in millions of closets back then.

I guess you didn’t have to be an epidemiologist to predict some of the after affects of this whole cultural change.  For example, the incidence of diabetes and other weight related illnesses has declined dramatically. We are also getting older and older as a population and we are retaining our faculties pretty well along the way too!  I have to give Google some credit here as well.  After all, there is no knowledge that can’t be found there and our extremely old baby boomers aren’t shy about using it. When we geezers aren’t generating electrical power, we are writing semi-literate passages on everything under the sun.  It sure has added a lot to our geriatric bag of tricks.  Our sons and daughters and all their offspring aren’t doing bad either.  Our new found collective fitness has reenergized and sharpened the thinking of everyone in the government and the private sectors. 

Then around five years ago, we installed yet another generation of elliptical and other cardio machines.  These were optically wired with high resolution telemedicine capability and allowed us to run our annual physicals at the same time we were generating plain old electricity.  The attached earphones we typically used for music also had super sensitive receptors to measure many of our critical vital signs. 

When we grabbed the closest set of hand bars (the ones we normally used to check our heart rate) during our physicals, we also generated information that was instantly sent to our primary care physician.  After that, all we had to do was stop by the lab for specimen collection and our physician soon had what was needed.  On our next trip to the cardio machines, we had a direct hook up to the doc who would share the results and free us for another year or ask us to come in for additional tests.  Our exercise club also had an on-site med tech who assisted us with special hookups for more sophisticated tests when needed. 

That’s it for now, I have to go.  Julieann and I are stepping out tonight for a little dining and dancing.  We are giving our ellipticals a little rest…