Time Travel in the Era of Covid

Like many people, I stopped going to the gym in March 2020 and never went back. It seemed like a bad idea to sweat and breathe heavily around other sweating, heavily breathing people, and it still does.

After a year of semi-frantic walking at lunchtime, I invested in a spin bike. Not a Peloton, because I’m not made of money, but a cheaper version of it. This bike has a number of features, including live classes, but I prefer the pre-recorded trips that follow the absurdly fit trainers on trips around the world. I’ve visited the lakes of Patagonia, the countryside of Costa Rica, and the shrines of Japan, all on a color screen about 30 inches from my beet-red face.

I first noticed the time travel on a trip where the trainer was passing people on the street wearing masks. It’s not always clear what year the trips were filmed, but the outdoor masks took me back to mid-2020, when we had no idea what to expect from a worldwide pandemic and wandered around stricken, trying to convince ourselves that everything would be okay. “You think it’s going to end soon, but it’s not,” I told them while pedaling in 2022. “Prepare yourselves for the long haul!”

The sensation of traveling back in time intensified when I found a 20-part cycling adventure through the Alps with trainer Tommy “Rivers” Puzey, who refers to himself as “Tommy Rivs.”

I soon learned that Tommy Rivs is a superstar runner and endurance athlete, but he’s so much more than that. He is a poet-philosopher, historian, geologist, endocrinologist, physiologist, and ethicist. He knows a lot about many things, but this knowledge is conferred upon spin bikers in their basement exercise rooms with a true generosity of spirit. Tommy wants you to know a little bit about the mountains you are “climbing” with him, and at the same time, how exercise is changing your body inside and out. He isn’t showing off. These are just things he knows that may help you on your “fitness journey,” whatever that may be.

Tommy Rivs has some rules that have to do with taking care around cars, gravel, train tracks, or any other potential danger to a non-basement cyclist, and he repeats them often. Rule No. 1: Don’t Get Dead. Tommy says this numerous times during a typical session, which might run from 35 to 50 minutes. It doesn’t matter who has the right of way, he says. If a 5,000-pound vehicle swerves into your path, you can’t argue with it. The best you can do is not get dead.

One day I decided to Google Tommy Rivs, and it turns out that early in the pandemic, he thought he had Covid but was instead diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. He was hospitalized, and because of Covid protocols, couldn’t see his wife or his three young daughters. His prognosis was not good as he endured months of brutal chemotherapy. At one point, his doctors medically induced a coma.

But Tommy Rivs did not get dead. He survived the treatment, his doctors said, because of his extreme fitness. Still, he lost 75 pounds from an already lean frame, and after a bone marrow transplant, had to relearn how to move his body again.

Now I follow 2018 Tommy Rivs up the mountain passes with the eerie knowledge of what’s coming for him. I want to tell him that cars won’t be what threatens his life a mere two years from when this trip was filmed. I wonder if his body already has signs of the cancer that will lay him low, sometimes wanting to die, but not dying, not getting dead.

On one of these rides, Tommy talked about how pain can be an illusion, akin to when you feel overheated but your core temperature is normal. You have to acknowledge the pain but push past it, he says, not knowing, as I do, that he will confront a different sort of pain all too soon. No one in these videos – not the faceless cameraman riding just behind Tommy Rivs, not the tourists walking through the small Alpine villages in search of wine and cheese, not the small blond children walking barefoot – knows that a pandemic is breathing down their necks, that they will be locked in their homes for months, that millions around the world will die.

Tommy Rivs doesn’t know that some of his super-efficient cells will mutate and grow into a disease that almost takes his life. I wish I could warn him as I’m pushing myself at a cadence way lower than Tommy recommends.

But I also know that Tommy Rivs survives, and that he astounds his doctors by entering the New York City marathon in November 2021, about a year after being released from the hospital. I know that this poet-philosopher-athlete, so clearly a gentle person with stamina beyond belief, finishes that marathon. It takes him nine hours, but he finishes.

“You’ll be okay,” I whisper as Tommy encourages me to pump harder, push a little bit more, love the pain.

Time travel is not for the faint of heart, so I listen to 2018 Tommy Rivs, who knows about so many things except for the detour his life will take two years into the future, which, in 2022, is now the past. They say you can’t turn back the clock, but you can restart the video and peer into another time whenever you want. It makes you wonder what’s just past the switchbacks on your own “fitness journey” into the future.