By Christopher Cudworth

A plate of harvested livers awaits transport to China and the Black Market

I’ve always been one of those people who, when faced with great change in life tends to surf the wave and add even more changes. As long as your apple cart is upset, you might as well pick up some oranges too, if they’re lying around. Or make that organs. Because that’s exactly what happened to me today. I went for a fitness test at the health club I just joined and learned that I have a liver. When you change your routine, it sets you up to learn all kinds of things.

Liver let die

Most of us apparently take the presence of our livers for granted. But if what the hunky health guy doing my testing tells me is true, the liver does a ton for us endurance athletes. It processes or busts up sugars and other gunk apparently. Which is why a bad diet and poor health habits just compound the problems we have in trying to get fit. Who knew?

Knowing the importance of our livers does answer all sorts of questions. Want to know why that run you just did sucked so bad? It might be your liver. Want to know why you got dropped going up that false flat on the ride last weekend when you felt great just a couple miles before? It’s probably your goddamned stubbon liver. I had no idea livers were so important to athletic performance. You learn something every day I guess.

Tastes unlike chicken

I do know that I hated eating cooked cow liver when it was a kid. The texture was awful, like eating a slimy piece of corduroy. The taste was really bad, too, like chomping on a wet, smelly sneaker. To make matters worse, my mother always always served lima beans when she cooked liver. Lima beans have the same texture as baby shit. Don’t ask me how I know. I raised two kids from scratch. Things happen.

Liver and lima beans. It was the most hated supper on earth.

“But you like lima beans and liver!” my mother would insist.

“Who told you that?”I’d demand to know.

“You ate it all up last time!”

Indeed I had. Because I was so terminally hungry as a skinny, scrawny kid I’d have eaten used tampons if you put them on my plate. That does not mean I liked liver and lima beans. It meant I was hungry as hell and had no choice but to eat whatever my mother made me eat. And sometimes it was liver.

Our bodies are nothing more than an organ store in the eyes of some people.

Life lessons

Funny thing about eating liver. It’s a little like other things in life that are unpleasant, even abhorrent, like eating liver, filling your senses with that fetid odor of meat that feels like it’s been cooked in used motor oil, and then right toward the end of eating it your mouth just gives in and it doesn’t seem to taste so bad. What a life lesson!

Marathon efforts

If you’re honest with yourself, it’s the same way with running marathons or riding centuries. With three miles to go you swear to yourself, “I will never, ever run (or ride) one of these again. It hurts too much. My crotch is hamburger. My feet feel like bruised clay. My nipples are bleeding. I’m pretty sure I shit my pants a little at 16 miles. I can’t wait to be done.”

Then you finally finish, feeling like a piece of chopped liver of course, and people slap you on the back and holler “nice race” or “what a fun ride”  and the process begins all over again again. The very real memory of hating yourself for even starting a marathon or riding a century recedes just an inch. In four more weeks you’re looking for another chance to torture yourself. Two months later you’re back in training with a bunch of other people abusing their bodies and calling it fun.

Dead or a liver

It’s rather amazing that your liver never really complains through all this mistreatment and misguided frivolity. That is, unless you have liver dysfunction and turn all yellow whenever you climb the stairs, your liver is generally as docile as Ed McMahon with Johnny Carson. As one doctor writes, “In my experience of over 20 years of clinical medicine, I have found that approximately one in every three persons has a dysfunctional liver. Even if the level of dysfunction is only slight, it will still have a negative impact on your immune system and energy levels.”

Yikes! A dysfunctional liver must be worse than flat feet! Time to get a transplant perhaps.

A sliver of liver

Some people actually do get liver transplants if their organ goes bad. You simply need a good liver to stay alive. And you need to be a good liver in order to have a good liver. These things tend to circle around like that, you see. At least the liver is useful even if it is prone to repeat itself.

It’s not like that stupid appendix we’ve got lying around, thanks to the vagaries of evolution. Vestigial, useless organs are generally rather rare in the bodies of living things. Yet we know that whales have feet and leg bones buried inside their blubbery bodies, and who really knows if there are not even more useless appendages or organs in the human body. Surely the audience for Rush Limbaugh no longer uses their brain. You could hold them down and carve out their skulls and they’d pop right back up and yell, “Dittos Rush!” Don’t laugh, it’s been medically proven.

A liver finally speaks up

When the health club needed an achilles tendon for one of their top paying customers, they held down a dizzy patron and harvested the tendon on sight.

I learned today that my liver can talk pretty loudly when it wants to. I was 12 reps into a squat test when fitness guy told me to make sure to keep breathing. Deeper. More breath, he warned. Then I finished the reps and stood there as the world seemed to turn all fuzzy and weird. I was faint, and nauseous, and wondered how in the hell 12 reps on a squat machine could make me feel like I was dying.

“It’s your liver,” he intoned. “And those waffles you had for breakfast? Spiked your blood sugar. You probably poured syrup on them too. Not a good combo. Now you’re dizzy.”

Hardly describes the feeling, honesty. I felt like a stripper who just slipped and fell off her pole, so to speak. In other words, weird. Disoriented. Didn’t really care about much. I don’t know what happened next to be honest.

I’m pretty sure he could have harvested my liver right then and I’d have never noticed them taking it, just like this scene from the movie The Meaning of Life by Monty Python. In fact the health club may be running a black market in organs for all I know. They put you on those machines, work you until you pass out and then carve out the organs they need to sell to organ dealers in China.

“Hey, look,” the fitness guy tells you. “You lost four pounds today. How’d that happen?”

They don’t tell you they just carved out your liver and sewed you back up. Then they give you a tattoo to cover up the scar. Just look around you at the club next time you go. Have you ever seen so many tattoos in your life? Well, for every tattoo you can be sure there is one less organ of some sort serving its original owner. There are hearts to be chopped out. Kidneys to gouge and sell. There’s even a market for fat up in the arctic. The Inuit love it on a spittle.

So now you know the dirty little secret about health clubs. They invite you to work out and then harvest your organs when you faint and wake up sweating and panting.

“Good effort!” they’ll yell to distract you. “Hey, nice tattoo!” they’ll exclaim.

Funny, you don’t recall having a tattoo before you came in that day. But it goes well with your adidas shorts, and who’s to say what people should do with their bodies?

Or what other people should do with yours. It’s a free world. But a new liver? That will cost you. Yes it will.