Ha! I knew it! I knew there was something fishy about exercise and now I’ve got the science to prove it!

I’m sure everyone has experienced time slowing down or speeding up. Meetings that involve graphs and flowcharts exert a powerful gravitational well that slow down time so much that such meetings should automatically be granted overtime pay, while happy times zoom by in a flash. There are many activities that slow time down, waiting in line at the DMV or having your teeth drilled for example, but those events (I hope!) aren’t part of one’s normal routine.

No, the worst offender in my book is exercise. Not only does exercise slow down clocks but it’s supposed to happen frequently, even daily. It’s a case of the misery literally never ending. 

For my purposes here, exercise doesn’t include fun activities that happen to involve physical movement. I’m talking about exercise for the sake of exercise. Something that supposedly builds strength or stamina. Or worse, strength AND stamina AND flexibility.

Is there anything more boring than stretching? I’m supposed to do a set of three 30-second stretches per leg. In theory, that should add up to a minute and a half each. Maybe somewhere they do, but not on earth. On earth, I stand there with my leg on a chair for what has got to be at least an hour. My husband Dave likes to torment me under the guise of “helping” if he sees me put my leg down.

“That wasn’t 30 seconds!”

“It was more than 30 seconds!”

“Not even close. Look, I’ll time you. Go.”

I bend my leg.

“No! Don’t relax yet. Keep it stretched!”

“I’m getting a cramp, and the time has got to be up!”

“It’s only been 8 seconds.”

“No, it hasn’t! Your watch stopped.”

“My watch is fine. Keep your leg up!”

I look at his watch which has stopped.

“I can prove it. It’s taken more than 30 seconds to have this conversation!”

“If you’d just quit fighting it, and do it, it wouldn’t be so bad.”

“Whose fighting? I’m doing it, aren’t I?”

“Oh brother,” says Dave with a huge eye roll. “There. Done. Get back here! You’ve still got two more sets on that leg!”

Meanwhile, the TV commercial has lengthened to match the stretch time, and I’m feeling a powerful urge to buy Liberty Mutual Insurance. 

Exercise videos aren’t any better. I’ve been tempted to turn off the sound on a “fun” aerobic dance workout and put on a learn Chinese audio program. I bet I could become fluent in a week or two with the time those so called “30-minute” workouts take.

But now I know that exercise time isn’t just a figment of my imagination. I came across a peach of an article from Guardian magazine, with this intriguing title: “People doing intense exercise experience time warp, study finds.” Hot dog!

Of course, I could have told them that — and moderate exercise cause time delays too.

But now I know I’m not alone. Others have been irritated enough by the phenomenon to do formal research like Ian Sample, the science editor quoted from several studies.

One study had three groups of people riding exercise bikes. Some rode solo, some had a virtual avatar for company, others were told to beat the avatar. It didn’t matter.

“People perceive time as moving more slowly during exercise,” said Andrew Edwards, a professor of psychology at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent, and the first author on the study.

How about that? You no longer need to ride in a spaceship approaching the speed of light to experience the effect of time dilation. You can just put your leg up on a chair and count to 30.

Ready? One, twooooooooo, threeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

It just goes to show that the old joke is true. If you exercise, you may not live longer, it will just feel as if you do.