On a beautiful summer day, Riverfront Park is a busy, noisy place.
Walkers compete with runners who compete with cyclists for space along the narrow park path. Screams of “on your left” are sometimes barely heard against a soundtrack of speeding cars and deafening motorcycles roaring down Front Street.
But there is one very calm space in the park — or actually 15 very calm spaces, where no one will bother you. These are the soft, woody ditches of ParCourse FitCircuit, a series of exercise pits along the path, each with a piece of simple metal equipment and a sign instructing you how to use it.
However, very few people do.
For the most part, the stations sit vacant all day alongside the path, a well-intended effort to encourage exercise, but now mostly used as the occasional plaything of climb-y, crawl-y children, who definitely are not in it for the total body workout.
But what if you are? What if you actually had the crazy notion to use these exercise stations, in order, as they were intended? Would you survive the experience? Or would you just be laughed at by the joggers/cyclists/skateboarders?
To find out, my girlfriend Andrea and I decided to complete the circuit as faithfully as possible. I wish I could say that we had long planned our fitness outing, but really we were just bored on a Sunday. Yet another glorious summer weekend had passed without an invitation to join a boozy pontoon boat party, so we needed something to do.
“Hey, let’s go use that exercise equipment in the park,” she said.
“Really?” I said, committed to my sad immobility, watching my beloved Washington Nationals fall behind in (and ultimately lose) another game.
“You’ll feel better,” she said cheerfully.
I doubted that, but rose from the sofa anyway and slowly changed into my baggy gym shorts. Then we set out on foot from our house farther down Front Street near the Taylor Bridge and, about a mile already expended, arrived at the course.
Near the corner of Front and Maclay streets, two large, double-sided signs introduce you to the fun about to come. One says, “Welcome to the ParCourse FitCircuit,” with an abundance of information about stretching and pulse rates and cool downs. The other is basically an ad for the sponsor, Capital BlueCross, which, back in 2009, footed the $53,000 bill for the construction.
We were fired up to start!
But wait.
We quickly saw that something was not right. The introductory sign said the first exercises, logically, were stretches and warm-ups. But the first station was not a warm-up, but a rather intimidating set of bars for the “Chin-Up” station. We then realized that the entire exercise circuit had been built backwards. We were staring at Station 15, the final, and one of the most difficult, exercises in the circuit. The first station was half-a-mile upriver.
So back it was to walking. We slowly passed the other stations, one by one, in descending order, farther and farther away from the sign that said, “Welcome to ParCourse FitCircuit.” We hoped that, by the time we reached the first station, we still would remember our instructions.
It wasn’t a completely pointless venture. Along the way, we took in the good (the wide variety of architecture along Front Street), the bad (another downed light pole lying like a corpse near Seneca Street) and the, well, interesting (let’s just say, as a general rule, that all men should wear shirts when they jog).
At the corner of Schuykill and Front, across the street from the low-slung, butt-ugly State Corrections Officers Association building, we reached our first destination, Station 1, an Achilles tendon stretch. As at all the stations, a prominent sign explained the exercise with a helpful sketch of a person performing it.
Andrea, a runner, had no problem.
I, on the other hand, am not very bendy. Sure, I have a “Y” membership and am pretty fit for some middle-aged bald guy, but flexibility is not my strong suit.
“You’re doing it all wrong,” Andrea said, a phrase she would repeat for almost the entire length of the 15 stops.
I gave it my best shot.
And so it would go for the next hour as we made our way through the rest of the circuit. Andrea would perform an exercise perfectly, and I would mess it up. About the only exceptions were the Vault Bar, which no one should do without professional instruction, and the last two, the Bench Dip and Chin Up, which required more upper-body strength. We also were perplexed by why Station 3 (Leg Stretch) is located in the middle of the course, between Station 10 (Sit-Up) and Station 11 (Push-Up). There’s no explanation.
After a few attempts, Andrea managed the vault.
But, in the end, the enjoyment was in the journey. Yes, it was a gorgeous day, with the stiff northerly breeze making it seem like some weird mix of August and October. However, it really was just an excuse to do something different in Riverfront Park, which, for all its flaws (weeds, cracked steps, groundhogs) remains a green gem on the wide, sparkling Susquehanna River.
It also allowed us to have some experiences we would have missed if we had just taken our usual stroll. For instance, we were nearly run down by former Friends of Midtown President Don Barnett, who, once he identified his near-victims, stopped his bike to chat for a minute. We had a nice talk about the strangely intriguing mural on the otherwise bland Governors Plaza South building.
Later on, we met David, an older guy who lives in the River Plaza apartments and was sitting on the bench across the street (also known as Station 10). We had to ask him to please stand a minute so we could do some sit-ups on it. He complied but wanted to know if we liked football and which church we belonged to. Then he told us about his church. He was the only person we saw, besides ourselves, “using” the equipment.
Afterwards, Andrea was right, I did feel better. I could tell that I had worked muscles that I had ignored for too long and that I needed to include more stretching into my normal workout. The next day, I felt a welcome fatigue in several areas of my body, like I did as a kid following the first ocean swim of summer vacation.
Wrapping it up at the Chin-Up station. Note: Poor form.
It’s fair to say that the ParCourse FitCircuit probably wasn’t the best use of $53,000 that Capital BlueCross has ever made, as I’m willing to bet that we were the only two people all weekend (all week? all month?) to try to use the course as it was intended. But, at least on this day, it gave us an excuse to be outdoors, doing something different, in a stunning river setting, on a gorgeous day, in the city of Harrisburg.
