Sweatin’ to the Internet

At one time, if a guy wanted to work up a sweat, he would head for the gym and go a few rounds with the house gorilla.

The other night, I worked up a very nice lather with Martha Stewart.

She showed me how to make a fabulous wreath out of braided green onions and last year’s tinsel. By the time we were through, I was drenched in sweat, my legs were rubbery and I was in a festive “Eggnog, anyone?” mood.

Martha and I got together at the Ventura YMCA on a Netpulse stair machine. This is the standard climb-to-nowhere torture device, but rigged to let you watch TV on your own private screen, listen to CDs, send and receive e-mail, cruise the Internet and check your heart rate as you work out.

If that isn’t enough, Netpulse, a San Francisco-based company that peddles these machines to health clubs, has a deal in the works with Hollywood studios to show coming attractions as well.

Netpulse shows you how far mankind has come.

For most of history, exercise meant outrunning saber-toothed tigers and bashing the Mongol hordes with sticks.

Then in the ‘70s, we started jogging. The highways were clogged with runners seeking the elusive endorphin high, a sense of peace and well-being known only to those with hundred-dollar sneakers and the body fat of grasshoppers.

Now there is a new ultra-’90s standard: Exercise a la Netpulse is not merely a path to nirvana and a way to make your abs as hard as stale bread, but also a means of accessing information while circulating the blood. Those aren’t just stair machines at the Y, bud; they are monuments to “multi-tasking,” the typically corporate buzzword for doing more than one thing at a time.

The other night I was doing all the work. Meanwhile, Martha was gracious and demure on her Internet screen, leading me through her test kitchen, with counter tops in her favorite hue of “milky green.” She was futilely trying to persuade me to make ribbon doodads for each day of Advent, and she was trying to sell me something called Tinsel Snowflake Kits.

At the time, it somehow seemed natural.

Looking back on it, though, I think it can be said that the American male who is trudging up a stairway to nowhere as Martha Stewart tries to sell him Tinsel Snowflake Kits has hit a peculiar low.

Of course, I ended our relationship tastefully. In the course of 40 minutes, I switched from Martha to Men’s Health magazine--”Ask the Sex Doc” was a grim antidote to Tinsel Snowflakes--to a dumb-joke service called Ha!, to a TV concert with B.B. King, who let me know he had a right to sing the blues and it had nothing to do with not getting enough exercise.

On the machine to my left, a pudgy musician with sweat streaming down his face was studying diagrams of Spanish guitar chords on a Web site called Rockeros.com To my right, a former Peace Corps volunteer was checking out the economic news from his old stomping ground of Zimbabwe.

In his office later, Mark Dengler, the YMCA’s executive director, recalled the day that “two Silicon Valley guys as geeky as geeky can be” came to him with great plans for hooking exercise machines to the Internet.

The rest is recent history. The geeky guys did customer surveys and ran focus groups at the San Francisco Y that Dengler managed at the time. From this marriage of commerce and cardiac training, the Netpulse was born, complete with advertising-laden screens and frequent-flier-mile premiums.

“When we bring tours through, people see it and their jaws drop,” Dengler said. “Each of those three machines is used 24 times a day. It far exceeds anything else we have.”

The big question is: How many tasks can we multi-task before we multi-tumble? Will we lose it altogether through the sheer psychic strain of climbing the stairs, watching Jerry Springer, e-mailing mom, reading Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick” soliloquy, planning a trip to Costa Rica, buying a vacuum cleaner, solving Fermat’s Last Theorem and resisting tinsel toys all at once?

It brings to mind Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous crack that the notoriously clumsy Gerald Ford couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

At this point, walking and chewing gum at the same time sounds like a sure path to a sense of peace and well-being.