Power drinks

Science! Fitness!! Power Drinks!!! Imagine the following scenario: Say you’re going to the Columbus courthouse to report for jury duty. Now say, hypothetically, that you are particularly enamored with the architectural style that was utilized in the design of the courthouse, and so you stand out in front of the building to admire its aesthetics. Now say that someone were to drop a boulder off of the roof and send it hurtling towards you at the speed of gravity. Now assume that I am eating at El Chile Rojo, two blocks away. I’m not saying that, in the time it would take for the boulder to hit the ground (approximately 4.2 seconds according to my highly dubious calculations), I would be able to sprint from the restaurant and catch the boulder before it smashed you. But I’m not saying that I wouldn’t be able to, either.
Why am I so sure of my physical fitness?
Yesterday, we had to take a physical fitness test for our Lifetime Fitness class, and according to my results, I am unfathomably healthy. You’d think that a semester spent stagnant on a futon eating pizza and only venturing outside to go to class would render me a fat slob, but no—rather, nay. For thou hath misspoke. According to the highly accurate methods of measuring fitness as employed by The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I can do 44 sit-ups in a minute, have 9% body fat (which is similar to most NFL wide receivers), and am of above-average flexibility for a dude. Of course, I can do only 21 push-ups before my arms give out, but who’s counting, right? Those are still pretty good numbers. To what do I attribute my physical superiority? I drink one power drink per day. Power Drinks? Indeed, power drinks.
For those of you who do not know what a power drink is, that’s perfectly natural, because I just coined the term about ten minutes before I started writing this column. To put it simply, power drinks are those drinks that rise above the lowly caste of “regular, boring, sucky beverage” like water or juice or soda, but fail to reach the category of “energy drink” like Red Bull or Monster or Maxenergy or any other beverage that looks radioactive and leads to uncomfortable amounts of energy. (Fun fact—Red Bull is banned in Denmark!) A “power drink,” therefore, is any drink that doesn’t promise energy, but doesn’t imply that you won’t do something awesome after having imbibed it. Something that is loaded with sugar and carbs, but still seems vaguely good for you.
I’m talking about beverages like Gatorade and Vitamin Water and Sobe, stuff like that. The type of drink that probably features a sweaty athlete in its commercials, the type of drink that promises to deliver countless quantities of delicious electrolytes that are in desperate need of being replenished. Honestly, I have no idea what an electrolyte is. The cynic in me wonders if it’s just a made-up term used by the power drink lobby to imply that their product is somewhat healthy, but then I think about how incomprehensibly awesome I feel after having ingested a G2, a beverage whose main claim is that it is an “electrolyte beverage.” I don’t know what that means, but I sure know it ain’t bad.
Hot Jam of the Week: “Low” by Flo Rida and T-Pain—This is without a doubt the worst song I’ve ever heard. Everyone should listen to it just to know how terrible it is. The only thing that saves me from wanting to run into oncoming traffic every time I hear this waste of three minutes and fifty seconds is the presence of the ubiquitous T-Pain, the greatest singer of all time.