The Tishrei yomim tovim are an inspiring time. For example, many people walk away from them inspired to lose weight. The inspirations might have started off as something better after the first couple of yomim tovim, but by the end it’s largely about losing weight. No pun intended.
Not that the yomim tovim didn’t have their exercises: Standing up and sitting down and standing up and sitting down and getting down on the floor and getting up several times while fasting, walking to a river, walking circles in shul, dancing circles in shul, lifting a chicken over your head with one hand, building a hut, taking down a hut… Not to mention how all the simanim on Rosh Hashanah put together are secretly also a siman for healthy eating. Which you immediately broke.
But now those yomim tovim are over, and you no longer have a socially acceptable reason to walk circles around your shul during davening, and frankly you’re annoying the other people in your row, because you’re making them keep getting up and down, which is how you keep them exercising. But they’re still annoyed. But what about outside of shul? How do you keep moving there?
“I’m not so motivated to work out,” you say. “It’s kind of boring and repetitive.” You pick up and put down the same object for a half hour, and then you run in place on a machine on which the floor moves but the entire time you’re staring at the same walls.
Yes, you can go walking outside. But walking takes too long, and the month is suddenly very short. Maybe you want something that’s like walking, but faster. Running?
Yeah, but running is boring.
Well, there are new ways to run races that are being invented every day to keep you on your toes. For example, I recently read a news story about a man—Christian Roberto Lopez Rodriguez of Spain—who ran a 100-meter dash in 12.82 seconds while wearing high heels.
Maybe to get his wife to stop complaining about them.
“Yeah, well you stretched out my shoes!”
To be fair, he doesn’t have to wear them to a whole chasunah, including carpet edges and stairs and sewer grates and crowded dancing. Or through a whole Yomim Noraim davening. (I think. My guess is that Christian isn’t Jewish.) The 100 meters he ran were probably the flattest, cleanest 100 meters you’ve ever seen.
In fact, his motivation to run fast was probably, “The faster I run, the sooner I can get these things off.”
Christian won the Guinness World Record for doing this, because apparently, this is a thing. The previous record was held by a German man named Andre Ortolf, who did the 100-meter dash in 14 seconds.
I don’t know if there’s a similar women’s record for loafers.
Anyway, this is when playing in your mother’s heels as a kid pays off.
High heels, you’d be surprised to hear, are not designed for quick sprints, despite leaning forward at an angle that would suggest they might be. They’re more designed to help women reach things on high shelves around the house, probably by some guy who didn’t want to keep getting up to help his wife. Though mostly women wear them to chase their kids around at social functions.
Christian’s time was only 3.24 seconds slower than Usain Bolt’s 100-meter sprint world record, which Usain did in crocs.
Christian has also broken other world records, including the longest duration balancing a bicycle on his chin (9 minutes, 41 seconds), the longest duration balancing an object on his nose (2 hours, 42 minutes), and the most consecutive stairs climbed while juggling three objects (2,082). I bet he’s a massive hit at chasunahs.
It does not sound like he has a day job.
Meanwhile, Andre Ortolf has moved on. According to a recent news story, he broke a record in May for the fastest to assemble a Mr. Potato Head blindfolded. (He was blindfolded. Mr. Potato Head was not.) It took him 12 seconds, if you don’t count arranging the pieces in specific spots beforehand so that he could do it in 12 seconds. Including that piece that you’re not sure if it’s an eyebrow or a moustache.
Wait, that’s how you have fun with Mr. Potato Head? I thought you were supposed to put the features in the wrong holes.
But 12 seconds is great, because I mean you’re an adult; don’t waste your time with Mr. Potato Head. 12 seconds is plenty. In fact, as an adult, cleaning up your kids’ toys quickly is a great talent to have.
I doubt he could do this as quick if he has to bend down and find the pieces under the couch.
Anyway, this is another race activity you can do, but not one that will help you lose weight, as it involves sitting still. And potatoes.
If you want a race that involves moving and also food, and you also want to avoid all that boring training beforehand, you can always do what 19-year-old Delaney Irving of Canada did spur-of-the-moment on a trip through Europe: She entered the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling Race last minute and won! While unconscious.
A number of years ago, I wrote about the Cooper’s Hill race, which is an annual race in England every spring in which the winner gets a massive 7-lb. wheel of cheese.
“I’m in!” you’re saying. “Wait, is it kosher?”
The cheese or the race? The cheese is not kosher. There is, however, a separate men’s and women’s race.
Sensible shoes are recommended.
Basically, the way it works is that the race organizers release a wheel of cheese at the top of Cooper’s Hill, which is a grassy, slippery hill that is taller than it is wide. Competitors then try to beat it down the hill, or at least come in second, by any means necessary, and the fastest person to do so gets the entire wheel of cheese, which they usually finish eating by the time they get out of the hospital.
Almost no one manages to stay on their feet the whole way down. The racers start off attempting to run or scootch, but there is no strategy for going down the hill that is faster than falling. The best strategy is to do what the cheese does: Just start rolling and bouncing and hope you don’t take out any bystanders. The less time you spend actually touching the ground, the shorter the distance from start to finish. It’s just science.
This year, only six people were taken to the hospital.
This was the strategy that Delaney took. About halfway down the mountain, she tripped, hit her head, and passed out, but she still managed to roll down the embankment faster than anyone else falling down the mountain who was conscious. Perhaps because she didn’t keep protecting her face. She kept rolling toward the finish line, mainly because the racing area is tilted that way.
It’s like they say: “B’derech she’adam rotzeh leileich, molichin oso.”
She was out for ten minutes, at which point she woke up in a medical tent with the wheel of cheese on her lap. She was the last person to know she won.
And now she has a wheel of cheese as well as an amazing thing to put on her shidduch résumé.
So anyway, maybe this is something you can do, because I think you’d agree that the best kind of exercise is the kind you can do unconscious.
Another race you don’t have to train for, apparently, is the Mexico marathon, which is held in Mexico City every August. Thirty thousand people competed this year. And according to reports, officials had to disqualify some of them for cheating. More accurately, they had to disqualify 11,000 of them for cheating.
“How do 11,000 people cheat in a race?” you’re asking.
The officials figure they used cars, bikes, and public transportation to cut parts of the course.
“No,” you’re saying. “I mean “What is making them pay money to register for a race they don’t have to compete in, and then decide to cheat?””
Well, for starters, they hold it in August. You can’t run 26 miles in August. In Mexico.
And then there’s the old (possibly racist) joke about how everyone in Mexico who knows how to run, jump, or swim is already in the United States.
Get it? Racist.
Also, once it’s that many cheaters, people figure they can say, “I just followed everyone else. I thought this was the route. You get on the bus, you switch to the train, you rent a Citibike…”
Officials figured this out days after the race when they received anonymous complaints about things like, “How did I finish in twelve thousandth place? I would have noticed if that many people passed me.” As well as from some who noticed that in the pictures taken after the race, a lot of these people didn’t look very sweaty for having run 26 miles.
So authorities investigated the trackers. Because apparently, there’s a tracking chip in the shirt that the runners have to wear. And they said, “Hey, these 50 people moved as a unit the entire time! Down this bus route!”
They found that several of the trackers were moving way too fast. Though I would say they should check first that the people were conscious. Like is that part of this race downhill?
Say what you will about the cheese race, but nobody is cheating. n
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of seven books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.
