At my sporting club I don't use a running machine anymore. I jack into my Technogym 700. This is an awesome high-tech machine, a sleek black treadmill for alpha geeks. When did getting fit turn into a video game?

This a running machine with much grander goals than allowing me to move on the spot and get fit when it's too wet to hit the streets. When you log on to the Technogym Run 700, you are booting up a computer and becoming a part of its world. The fascia has an instrument panel that wouldn't disgrace the space shuttle. Front and centre is a digital LED rotary dial which looks like the speedometer of a car. I time my runs, and the LEDs dial sweeps round until I've completed 100 per cent of my usual 20 minutes. In the middle of this dial, positioned with the sly precision of a neuro-linguisitic programming guru, is the word "Goal."

To the right of this dial is a keypad rather like the pad of an ordinary mobile phone, for entering in variables like the duration of my target run. To the left are programme buttons that allow me to select whether I want to do a time trial, a heart work-out, or an endurance programme. There are two silver handles which, when gripped, detect my pulse and display my heart rate, probing the workings of my inner organs like the Tricorder from Star Trek. This isn't a running machine. It's a medical experiment which you perform upon yourself. There's a plastic clip which attaches to my shirt so that if I fall over it will act as a kill-switch and turn of the treadmill, and this I think is a telling detail. I've never seen anyone actually use it. It's there to prevent litigation in case of serious injury, and as a symbolic umbilicus to attach users to their new mechanical mothers.

My run is now a process of biofeedback, a dialogue between man and machine. I don't focus on my body, or on what I'm actually feeling. I focus on what the machine has to tell me about what is going on. I am reminded of the birth of my son, when the midwife and my sister-in-law and I sat beside my wife's bedside with our faces turned from her, instead gazing anxiously at a foetal monitor to see the digital representation of her contractions, and so ignoring her strained and anxious face. Surely this is all a dreadful mistake? When did childbirth become a game of Pong?

The machine can't do everything. It can't stop me sweating. On the other hand, it would be nice if when I got too hot and my face felt sweaty (that can happen when you run for a long time) I could press a button and get a jet of cooling air streamed at my face. Just a sec. The Technogym 700 has a button with a fan symbol on it. I press it. A fan sends a jet of cooling air streaming at my face…

The gym has NEC plasma screens showing the cable television channel The Hits, and the soundtrack from the pop videos on this channel blasts out of the wall-mounted Hitachi speaker systems as I run. The plasma screens show snatched erotic glimpses of perfect bodies, Gwen Stefani's elegant throat, Robbie William's buff abs, the soft-porn of the modern music industry video. It's all fetish gear, high-heels, leather, a sort of shared, high-speed What the Butler Saw. The running machine and the television are working together. The running machine is the journey. The television is the destination. The goal is to end up like the people in the videos, with the same rock-hard glutes, the same tiny body mass. One look at the people on the screen and you know they all worship at the Church of the Technogym 700 and his many robot cousins.

I check out the copy on the Technogym website, and it's pure Sirius Cybernetic Corporation prose (the people who made the robots known as "Your plastic pal who's fun to be with!" in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) The copy is targeted at health clubs, and the Californian prose explains that the company's equipment offers "a multisensorial experience which will align your club and your members more closely with the concept of wellness." Ah, the concept of wellness.

Those bloody Americans, eh? Not so fast. Technogym was founded by Nerio Allesandri and is based in Ceseni, Romagna. If the Italians, the world's leading romantic and hedonistic epicures, have been assimiliated, then we really have a problem.

Michael Parsons is Editor of CNET.co.uk, the personal technology and consumer electronics website. He was Editorial Director of the Industry Standard Europe and European correspondent for The Red Herring magazine, and spent five years working in Silicon Valley and worrying about technology. He can be reached at Michael.parsons@cnet.co.uk

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