in which a significant purchase provokes much self-examination, justification, and, as usual, swearing

I have a confession: as of late, we have not been behaving as though there is a recession on. In fact, we’ve probably spent more money in the last three months than we did in the previous twelve months combined. Of course, our personal financial circumstances have actually improved, if anything, and most of the money we have spent has been on improvements to our home that we either needed to make it child-safe or needed in order to be able to take a shower in the absence of mold. We’re still wearing the same old clothes and driving the same old cars, but behind the scenes, we have been writing sweaty checks right and left. Or at least it feels that way.

This week we bought an elliptical trainer. I’m not sure we’ve ever straight-up bought a single item that cost that much money, with the exception of my flute (which—trivia!— cost over five times as much as the elliptical trainer), unless you count our house. Our cars are hand-me-downs. Our furniture is hand-me-down. I suppose we’ve spent that much on computers before, but our priciest current computer was a graduation present. Our appliances came with our house. We don’t own a working television. We have the crappiest stereo equipment ever owned by any person with an advanced degree in music. Can you tell I’m in justification mode? We would not have bought it if we couldn’t afford it. We can. But being able to afford something has rarely been a good enough excuse for either of us when it comes to justifying purchases.

We were raised to be frugal, to attach moral significance to the spending of money. Exercise equipment has always been the sort of thing that falls in the category of Shit That Other Kind of American Spends Money On. I felt reasonably okay about myself when I bought a fifty-dollar treadmill I found on Craigslist from an undergraduate living in a grubby downtown apartment, but standing in the Sports and Fitness section of Sears, I felt like…a consumer. Which I am. A consumer of a big pile of plastic and metal that will, someday, end up in a landfill somewhere, polluting the planet.

We discussed and debated this purchase for a long time beforehand. As I’ve written before, both of us are runners, but Eric is in a much harder-core category than myself. He’s been running for over a decade; he’s done two marathons and is trained up for another half-marathon in April; he has The Calves. Unfortunately, like many of the hardcore, he’s also plagued with a few persistent injuries. I never understood why not being able to run made him so frustrated until I started running myself and became an endorphin addict. “Why can’t you just go on a fast walk?” I’d ask. Now I get why he scoffed. I may as well have asked him why he couldn’t just drink a Coors Light when we were out of India Pale Ale. A fast walk is the kind of beer with a low enough alcohol content to be found in a Kansas grocery store. A run is a microbrew brewed by former chemistry majors living in Colorado who grow heirloom tomatoes in their spare time and make yearly vision quests to Belgium.

I’d used an elliptical before, and found it to be safely up there in the ultra-hopped seven percent alcohol range in terms of post-exercise buzz. Eric remained skeptical until we went to Sears, where he really pushed the sales people to make their best pitch. Does it exercise the same muscles groups as running? Do you really get the same level of cardiovascular workout? He pressed them for a good twenty minutes, and they gave us the full pitch, complete with a mini-dissertation on the Evils of Running. According to these guys, running is roughly equivalent to giving your joints a daily pounding with a jackhammer. I’m pretty sure they overstated the case, but never mind. The important thing is that we decided to buy the sucker, along with a five-year guaranteed repair plan, because if you’re going to spend that kind of money, you may as well go whole-hog and protect your investment.

After saying, “I can’t believe we just fucking bought an elliptical trainer” about ten times apiece, we accepted that we’d just fucking bought an elliptical trainer. The fact is, we are both insane without regular high-intensity exercise, and we can’t fit gyms into our schedule without encroaching on the time we spend together. And Eric has this injury issue, and I hate running in high winds and inclement weather, which we have a lot of around here. We will use the hell out of this thing.

But it also provoked a big old huge conversation about simplicity and consumerism, and the ideas of simplicity that we grew up with, and the ideologies behind “simple living” movements, and what we like about them and what we don’t. (We’re Mennonites. It’s a whole big baggage thing.) So expect something about that from me in the next week or so. And if you will leave some comments suggesting questions on and/or aspects of this subject that I might explore here, I promise not to write anything more about running or fitness equipment.