The pad clicked alive under my weight
I was a heavy kid. Not the kind of heavy that gets mentioned politely at doctor's visits, but the kind that shapes a childhood—the last picked, the one who sits out, the body experienced primarily as obstacle and shame. The NES Power Pad arrived as a gray plastic grid of sensors, cheap and unconvincing, laid over our living room carpet like a technological prayer mat.
The game was simple: run in place, and your avatar runs. Jump, and your avatar jumps. For the first time in my life, my body was not spectacle but interface. The pad clicked alive under my weight. The carpet hummed with my effort. The Nintendo listened. Running in place—an absurd gesture, going nowhere, pure expenditure—became communion. Flesh and pixel were speaking a new dialect, and in that dialect, effort was input, sweat was signal, breath was bandwidth.
I was writing myself into the game, and the game was writing me into a body I could inhabit differently. Not thinner, not faster, not acceptable—but responsive, intelligible, worth hearing. Movement became language.
The smallest possible temple
Years later, illness cleaved my timeline. Bed became country, ceiling became sky. The body that had learned to speak through the Power Pad went silent—not from shame this time but from collapse. Serious illness does not arrive as drama; it arrives as incremental subtraction. First you cannot run, then you cannot walk far, then you cannot stand long, then standing itself becomes the day's achievement.
The WiiFit balance board arrived in this season as a white plastic altar—forgiving in its simplicity, exacting in its measurement. I set it up in my bedroom, the smallest possible temple. Wobble became liturgy. The board measured my center of gravity, visualized my sway, asked me to hold tree pose for thirty seconds. Thirty seconds became eternity. The screen showed my body as a dot that would not stay still, trembling at the threshold of verticality.
But the board did not judge. It witnessed. Every day I stood on it, and every day it recorded that I had stood. The body was rewriting itself, sentence by sentence, according to the simple grammar of presence: I am here, I am upright, I am breathing, I am holding.
Standing became a first line. Tree pose became a paragraph. The slow return to walking became a chapter. The WiiFit did not gamify this—there were no leaderboards for people climbing out of bed. It simply made the invisible visible: you are here, you are doing this, your body is speaking again.
This is what XR fitness could be: a technology of witnessing. A way of making the body legible to itself in the midst of transformation.
Propping the book on the handlebars
When I recovered enough to sustain effort, I acquired a stationary bike. And on that bike, over the course of two years—fall 2017 through 2019 and into the pandemic—I experienced the most illuminating intellectual renaissance of my life.
I would mount the bike, clip in, and read. Not casually, not scanning articles between intervals. I read chapters of novels, art theory, graduate-level texts, propping the book or the iPad on the handlebars and pedaling through them. Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler—the metaleptic novel where the reader is both inside and outside the story—absorbed at seventy RPM. Invisible Cities—Calvino's crystalline architectures of memory and desire—at eighty RPM on the hills. The Baron in the Trees—a man who climbs into the canopy and never comes down, constraint as the condition of freedom—pedaled through in two sessions. Jorge Luis Borges's short stories, one after another—the labyrinths, the libraries, the gardens of forking paths—each one a three-mile ride. John Fowles's The Magus—a man lured onto a Greek island where a designed experience rewrites his entire perception of reality—consumed across weeks of daily rides. And two enormous volumes of art history, 1900 to the present, the full century of experimentation from Duchamp through Kaprow through Warhol and into the immersive turn.
What I discovered on that bike was not a reading habit. It was an embodied epistemology. The pedaling wasn't background noise the mind tuned out. The pedaling was the scaffold. The rhythm of the legs drove the rhythm of comprehension. My body was occupied—engaged, rhythmic, spending energy—and because it was occupied it stopped interfering with the reading. The tool became transparent. The bike disappeared and what remained was the book, its ideas embedding themselves in my musculature, in the specific cadence of effort that accompanied each chapter.
I can tell you where I was in the interval cycle when I first understood Borges's "The Library of Babel." I can feel the gradient of the hill program that accompanied my reading of Calvino's description of Ersilia—the city of strings. The ideas were not stored as propositions in my head. They were stored as movement patterns in my body. Spatial cognition scaffolds all thinking; the body moving is the body thinking. I proved it on a stationary bike going nowhere, reading the books that would become the source code of my own.
The paradox is pure Power Pad: going nowhere. Pure expenditure, stationary movement, the absurd gesture of cycling in place. But the nowhere-going was what freed the mind. The body's occupation was the mind's liberation. And by the time I walked into ITP in the fall of 2019, I had already read the curriculum in my body. I just didn't know it was a curriculum yet.
You wire yourself into a circuit
When I recovered enough to move beyond my room, I found my way to fencing. I had fenced as a teenager—épée, the most philosophical of the three weapons, where the entire body is target and there is no right-of-way, only who hit first. Fencing is the original embodied human-computer interaction: you wire yourself into a circuit, and the machine reads your touches as truth.
The blade connects to the body cord, the body cord to the reel, the reel to the scoring box. When your point compresses against the opponent's lamé, the circuit completes, the light fires, the box buzzes. There is no ambiguity, no negotiation. The machine does not care about your intention—only your execution. The hit is inscribed electrically, recorded without metaphor.
But the beauty of fencing is that this circuit is not mere measurement—it is grammar. Right-of-way in foil and saber creates syntax: who attacked first, who parried, who riposted. The phrase d'armes—the sequence of actions that leads to a touch—is a sentence spoken in steel and timing. Distance is grammar's ground. Too close, and the actions blur into noise. Too far, and nothing connects—silence. Perfect measure is the distance where meaning becomes possible, where threat and safety balance on a knife's edge, where you can write and be read.
Technique is archive. A lunge is a sentence spoken across centuries, refined by generations, authored anew by your timing, your angle, your intention. The parry-riposte is call-and-response, a couplet. The feint is misdirection, a parenthetical. The remise is insistence, repetition for emphasis. You learn this language by speaking it, by letting your body accumulate the grammar until you can compose in real time, faster than thought.
This is the model: an interface that makes the body's language legible, that records without judging, that creates a grammar precise enough to enable infinite variation.
Same route, different text
Today I am a daily exerciser. You will find me in the park running, at the boxing studio, at the pilates studio, or out at Rockaway Beach surfing. Each practice is a different dialect of the same language: movement as inscription, the body writing itself into form.
Boxing teaches you that the pocket—the range where you can hit and be hit—is intimacy's edge. Too far out and you are safe but silent. In the pocket, you are composing in real time: jab-cross-hook-slip-roll. These are syntactic structures, clauses that build into sentences, sentences that build into arguments. The jab is a question: are you there? The cross is a statement. The hook is a turn of phrase, coming from an unexpected angle. Defense writes in negative space—the slip makes the punch miss by inches, the roll makes it slide over your shoulder. Sparring is duet. You are reading your opponent faster than thought, composing your response before you know what you are saying. The body has internalized the grammar so deeply that consciousness arrives late, as witness rather than author.
Surfing is writing on a page that will not hold still. The wave is a moving surface, and your body is the brush. The drop is pure trajectory: you commit to the line, and gravity becomes grammar. There is no revision mid-drop—you have already written the sentence by choosing your position, your angle, your timing. Wipeout is erasure, the ocean reclaiming the page. Paddle back out is revision: you will try again, write it differently, find a cleaner line.
Pilates makes the invisible visible. The springs define constraint—resistance that asks you to move precisely, efficiently, without momentum or compensation. Every exercise is a study in proprioception: can you feel the difference between engaging your transverse abdominis and bracing your rectus? Can you articulate your spine one vertebra at a time? Pilates taught me that transformation is about specificity. You do not get stronger by doing more; you get stronger by doing precisely, by teaching the body to organize itself efficiently.
Running is the simplest practice and the hardest to explain. Left-right, left-right, breath finds meter. The loop becomes memory palace: that tree where I always pick up the pace, that bridge where I check my form, that hill where I negotiate with my body about whether we are doing this today. Same route, different text. Running taught me that presence is about showing up. The runs I remember are the ones where I was most fully there—the morning after a hard night when I ran anyway, the day I realized I was no longer counting down the distance but inhabiting it.
Inscriptions in air that fade but were real
Beat Saber arrived as revelation: movement as conducting, light-armed composition in real time. The blocks fly toward you in rhythm, and your sabers trace arcs through space—red right, blue left, slash the direction the arrow indicates. At first it is overwhelming: too fast, too much, too precise. Then the body learns. The arms begin to anticipate, the feet begin to shift weight, the breath begins to synchronize with the beat.
And then it happens: you stop playing Beat Saber and start inhabiting it. The blocks are notes, and you are performing them. Your body is writing the music into space, and the music is writing your body into form. The sabers leave trails of light—literal traces of your movement, inscriptions in air that fade but were real.
This is what XR fitness promises: to make movement visible as language, to turn the body into both pen and page, to create constraint precise enough that infinite variation becomes possible within it.
But Beat Saber also reveals XR fitness's failure. The scoring intrudes. The leaderboards loom. The game wants you to optimize—faster, more accurate, higher multiplier. The externalized motivation eclipses the intrinsic devotion. You start chasing points instead of presence, and the practice hollows out.
The body remembers
The points were never the mark. The mark was what the arms left in the air, and every surface before this one kept one too.
The Power Pad taught me that movement is language, that the body can speak and be heard. Illness taught me that standing is a sentence, that verticality is a gift, that transformation happens one breath at a time. The stationary bike taught me that the body in motion is the mind in motion—that pedaling through Borges and Calvino embedded their architectures in my musculature, that I arrived at ITP carrying a curriculum I had read with my legs. Fencing taught me that precision is grammar, that distance is meaning, that the body can write faster than thought. Boxing taught me that the pocket is intimacy, that defense is syntax, that sparring is duet. Surfing taught me that the wave is a moving page, that the drop is commitment, that wipeout is revision. Pilates taught me that proprioception is literacy, that breath is punctuation, that precision is not perfection. Running taught me that consistency is devotion, that the route is memory, that presence is showing up.
The child is still running in place on the Power Pad, still discovering that effort is input, that sweat is signal, that the body can speak. Every practice since has been an elaboration of that first conversation. Every workout is an essay. Every session is a sentence. The body is the text, and we are writing it into being, one movement at a time.
Every stage of this progression is a thaumotrope. Conscious effort on one side, embodied automaticity on the other, and the lived experience of learning—the thing that actually changes you—produced by the spinning between intention and habit. The Power Pad taught my eight-year-old body to spin the disc. The stationary bike taught my recovering body to read while spinning. Beat Saber taught my adult body that the disc never stops.
Suppose it did not
And the trace should be allowed to outlive the session. The saber's trail fades. Suppose it did not. Suppose the arc you carved stayed where you carved it, and someone arrived after you—a day later, a season later—and came upon it hanging in the space. The grammar changes. A mark made for no one becomes a letter the moment another person stands where it landed. You did not address it; the finding makes the address. The fencing circuit already knew this: the hit is not complete until something outside you reads it. The body is both pen and page, but a page that persists acquires a reader. Self-inscription becomes correspondence. That is more than witnessing. It is the practice writing past its author.