Do you rap?” asks Dorothy Evans, my trainer for the coming hour.
“Rap?” I ask, hesitating to suggest that no white guy – with the possible
exception of Marshall Mathers – should ever do any such thing.
“Yes, can you rap?” she repeats. My brain is a little slow, fogged by jet lag.
I’m at the award-winning Gravity gym, beneath the Le Parker Meridien hotel,
in New York, for a high-tech workout that should blow away those cobwebs.
I chose it because, although experience has shown me that exercise is one of
the best ways to force my body to adjust its chronological drift, I loathe
the preening competitiveness of the NYC gym scene. In contrast, this
training session involves a giant, steroid-pumped Wii machine that projects
onto the wall of a racquetball court.
For those of you who have yet to catch up, the Wii is an interactive wireless
gaming system with handheld controllers that can detect motion in three
dimensions. You simply hold the remotes and move your arms to control the
on-screen action.
Normally, you play on a television set, but Gravity has gone one better and
blown it up to the Wii equivalent of Cinemascope. Sports such as tennis or
boxing on this big screen are meant to be good, calorie-burning fun. But not
if this involves me rapping.
Dorothy produces two long rolls of bandages. “You’ve never wrapped your hands
before?”
She takes each of my mitts in turn and carefully swaddles them in crepe. No,
I’ve never wrapped my hands before, although I’ve boxed in gyms. Nobody
thought it necessary. But this is America, where a bruised knuckle might
lead to an appearance in a different kind of court. Still, as I tell
Dorothy, it feels good to have my fists protected, even though I am only
taking on 6ft-high cartoon figures in a Roger Rabbit-style world.
Wrong. “You can’t fight the big fellas till I see how you can throw a punch,”
Dorothy says.
My face must have looked like my son’s when I take his PS2 away. There are
precious few of these projector Wiis in existence, and Nintendo has beefed
up Gravity’s so the response time is faster and the menu easier to navigate.
I want to play.
Dorothy, however, has me do some step-ups, then she slips on the target pads
so I can take a few swings at her. Using my lardiness to put power behind
the punches, I acquit myself pretty well.
“Okay, let’s see how you do in the ring.” She takes my gloves off and hands me
the Wii controllers, lining me up so that I’m facing the giant screen. It
isn’t quite the holodeck from the Starship Enterprise, but it’s pretty
involving, not to say intimidating. “I'll start you with an easy opponent.”
The bell goes, and out comes a tough-looking ’toon with a bad moustache. I aim
for that and am rewarded with a loud thwack. There are two main differences
between this Wii and a regular, household one: the opponents are life-size
and on roughly the same level as you, so you aren't peering down at
miniatures on a small screen; and there is far more room to manoeuvre than
in a normal living room. You can duck, jab and weave without knocking
anything precious off the shelves – and, best of all, there is no dog
looking at me with a “what the?” expression on its face.
It helps, too, that the ’toons knockout. The theme music from can’t punch
back, except at your Rocky bursts unbidden into my head. avatar – although
no doubt Then Dorothy reveals my heart rate: Nintendo is working on that. I
125. All through the bout it had been manage a decision on points. falling,
though I was punching my “Right, more of the real thing.” hardest and
fastest.
I glove up again and slap at the as hard with the Wii, but you aren’t,” she
says. “Without the impact, it just isn’t the same. The truth is, we use the
Wii as a recovery period after the real boxing, and to keep things
stimulating.” It certainly does that. At the end of the hour, my head has
cleared and I feel as if I’ve been with myself. I’ve found a way to cheat:
if you throw out your arm in a kind of fascist salute, the machine gets
confused and delivers an eye-popping right hook to your virtual challenger.
After further real-time exercises, I’m ready for a last fight, and now Dorothy
shows me something interesting: my heart rate, which is up to 150 beats per
minute. I take on the machine’s version of Apollo Creed and score a through
a pretty good workout. It also feels as if it lasted about 10 minutes. “Now,
would you like to hit the trainer?”
“Er, okay.” It turns out she means the Wii ’toon trainer, who holds up pads
for you to punch, just like the real thing. If you miss the target, however,
you thump the trainer. Hard. It’s curiously addictive.
“Yeah,” Dorothy says ruefully as she removes my gloves. “A lot of people like
doing that.”
Rob Ryan travelled as a guest of Virgin Atlantic and W Hotels
Travel details: the Gravity gym is at Le Parker Meridien (118 West 57th
Street; 00 1 212-245 5000, www.parkermeridien.com;
doubles from £136). Guests can buy a day pass for £5; for nonguests, the
price is £13. An hour’s training session with the Wii costs £50, or you (and
a friend or two) can rent the court and the machine, without Dorothy, for
£26. As well as boxing, you can try golf, bowling and tennis, with other
activities on the way.
Stay at the W New York – The Court (130 East 39th Street; 685 1100, www.whotels.com),
which has doubles from £177. Or try the Cosmopolitan (95 West Boradway; 566
1900, www.cosmohotel.com), which has
smart, small doubles from £107.
Virgin Atlantic (0870 380 2007, www.virgin-atlantic.com)
flies to New York from Heathrow, with fares starting at £383. Or try British
Airways (0844 493 0787, www.ba.com),
Continental (0845 607 6760, www.continental.com),
American Airlines (020 7365 0777, www.americanairlines.co.uk)
or Delta Air Lines (0845 600 0950, www.delta.com
).
