In a tube, darkly

What I don't enjoy so much about my new gym are the monitors attached to most of the machines. I give TV a pretty wide berth at home and try to extend that to my activities outside. My old gym was not fancy enough to have this type of machine. At Fancy New Gym, there are some machines with no screens, but at peak times, those tend to be taken up by people who (I imagine) are like me.

Today I used a treadmill with a screen, leaving the screen dark. It was uncomfortable at first. I was unable to avoid an interaction with Exercise Self. Exercise Self looks a lot like me, except she wears tighter, stretchier clothes, eats energy bars, and logs her workouts online. Exercise Self probably doesn't have a lot of time to read or write poetry, since she is obsessed with sites like ExRx and what the right kinds of stretches for a sore groin muscle. The one thing that's good about Exercise Self is she likes a lot of the same music I do, so it's not hard to come up with a good playlist for her workouts. Exercise Self probably would not want to listen to Glenn Gould's hour-long radio tone poem, The Idea of North, though. Exercise Self doesn't really want to know about persistent rotator cuff injuries, the Feldenkrais technique, or yoga, though she ignores these at her peril.

Is there a way to exercise without becoming Exercise Self? I am not sure. When I speak Italian or Spanish, it's hard not to become Italian Self or Spanish Self. (Those selves are both a wee bit shorter than me, more effervescent, and seem to use lots of idioms.) Is fragmentation of the self a bad thing? I guess not, if it doesn't take half a day and a lot of alcohol to get back to your functioning primary self?