At first I thought I’d seen someone running through the park in a bulletproof vest. I’ve spent years of my life in places where some people might have reason to do that, but this was South County Dublin where affairs are mostly settled in ways that don’t involve public bloodshed.
Then I thought, vaguely, that people had just started wanting a lot of pockets on their runs, because it looked as if the kind of cargo trousers in which not even the strongest suburban dad would be able to move if all the pockets were in use at once had migrated to the torso. Phone, Leap card in case of fatigue/fake exercising, tissues, and what else?
Mostly when I’m running, I’m listening to my podcast and keeping my dog-off-lead-radar spinning and not much interested in what other runners are wearing, so it was only when weighted vests started to be mentioned on podcasts about women and fitness in midlife that I understood.
My initial instinct was to be dismayed. Should I have one? Was I supposed to be making my daily life more difficult on purpose? There was also a frisson of sneaky interest: would it burn more calories faster? For me, and for many of us, this line of inquiry is a wide road to the Inferno and I shut it down. (The answer, in case you’re among this group, is that you should eat what you want when you want it and you should move your body in ways that feel good, and the relationship between these activities can safely be left to the myriad systems in your body that managed just fine for thousands of years before diet culture replaced instinct with counting and control.)
It’s not that I don’t see the appeal. If your time for exercise is painfully squeezed out of time to care for your family, time to do your job, time to clean your house and cook your meals and call your mother and get yourself and your family where you need to go, a garment that promises greater intensity in a shorter time has obvious attraction.
It just seems a bit odd that while running shoes are sold partly for how light they are, with runners eager to pay more for shoes that weigh only a few grammes less than cheaper ones and/or allegedly make it easier to run faster, the same runners are then apparently willing to spend more money on a vest whose sole purpose is to add weight to our bodies, making it harder to run faster. I understand that you might want light feet for racing and a heavy torso for training, but even so all this weighing and measuring seems far from pleasure and spontaneity.
I feel similarly about treadmills. I use them occasionally, in hotel gyms if I’m somewhere it’s not sensible to run alone before dawn, and it feels better than not running but possibly not in a healthy way. Even with a screen that lets you choose virtual routes around the world’s most picturesque trails, treadmill running feels like punishment, and I find it impossible not to get hooked on the metrics, not to think I’ll just keep going until first the calorie count and then the mileage and the calorie count hit a nice round number.
It’s reasonable to feel punished by such machines. Treadmills were first built for use in prisons, to add the brutality of constant exertion to the brutality of confinement and inadequate food – a regime that sounds alarmingly close to some people’s new year’s resolutions. As far as I know, weighted vests have not been imposed on humans in disciplinary and carceral contexts, but other forms of weights and shackles certainly have.
I’m not suggesting that it’s wrong to wear a weighted vest. Within the commandments and the law, do what you need to survive end-stage capitalism. But when that need includes spending your money on tools of self-discipline that look a lot like the tools of punishment; when the technology of 19th-century prisons is sold to us as healthful; when humans learn to treat ourselves as things – it’s worth asking some questions. Who’s profiting from our pain, and how could we have more fun?