The day after I agreed to Coach's training regime he called me for a fitting of high-technology garments. I doubted that he understood the implicit contempt that I held for my own body, and how that would affect any attempt to mold it into something important for its own sake. My body mostly took care of itself when I was a child -- I ignored it and it ignored me. We had an uneasy truce, easily broken and in at least one case resulting in all-out civil war.
As an undergraduate my body served mostly as an alcohol filter, absorbing each night's indulgence rapidly enough that my brain could function the next day. As a doctoral candidate my body's main function was to keep my brain alert and active despite the lack of sleep, sometimes helped with a big handful of chemical stimulants. It did a yeoman's job overall, but those few times it let me down damaged our relationship rather badly. Most recently its main function had been to maintain consciousness -- to never let my physical self degrade into obvious sleep despite how desperately dull the meetings, conferences, or office hours with hung-over undergrads.
So now I was to be a running machine. My body would be transformed again into a device to move itself rapidly from place to place over long distances and times. Color me skeptical.
After many intensive (and a bit invasive) measurements, I was finally presented with what looked like a sports bra made of a sheer, shiny black fabric. After the alarming feeling of it snugging itself to my every curve, I felt a great relief, as if gravity itself had been switched off. I ran the track again, and after the first few steps I had to let out a little cry of surprise. The active harness, as it was called, was anticipating the bounce of my steps and sending pulses of low frequency energy to counter the movement, leaving only a residual high-frequency jiggle.
I powered around the track, my breasts splitting the air like the prow on an unstoppable ocean liner. My back straightened and I thrust my chest forward, pushing myself faster to see what they would do. The higher harmonics felt like bolts of lightning shooting from my nipples, dragging me forward. I realized that much of how I felt about moving had to do with the small aches and pains that came from tiny things that were easily overcome. I was elated and flushed when I finally stopped.
And then Coach put the stockings on me. The stockings were actually an elastic knit of electropolymer that stuck to my skin just above the knee and stopped just above the ankle. Woven into the fabric was a fine network of sensors and actuators that would read my muscle movements and could produce tiny electrical shocks in response. The triumph of the bra flowed out of me like cold water. My legs were suddenly leaden and sluggish, like I was walking hip-deep in sludge. It felt like a dream -- one of those bad dreams where you are trying to get somewhere and your legs won't cooperate.
Turns out I had been walking wrong all my life. My legs had learned "bad habits" as Coach called them, and needed to be retrained. The stockings would punish wrong actions and reward right actions, in small ways that I wouldn't feel at a conscious level, at least in theory. There were a few days there, at first, when I was nearly in tears for reasons I couldn't entirely articulate. Coach tuned the response down somewhat and it went away. It took a while, but eventually I realized I was gliding along on the balls of my feet rather than plodding as I had always done. Each step stored energy and released it like a spring. I felt like a cat.
How was I to know I didn't know how to walk?
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