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Ever dreamed of being an astronaut? Of rocketing toward the stars and looking back to behold the gauzy blue globe of Earth? I suppose I did—I was nearly five when America first reached the moon, a teenager when The Right Stuff hit movie theaters—and I knew that it required stamina, grit, and a willingness to be subjected to peculiar experiments. But I never expected anything like the scene on a recent morning in a grim brick building in the woods outside Moscow, where I lay on a cold examining table, shivering and flinching as a stern-looking Russian woman slapped squares of sticky tape onto my bare chest.

Each square held down a wire or cord that would help her and other medical workers monitor my vital signs. The number of wires and cords suggested that my vital signs would need very careful monitoring. This worried me, but not as much as the way my dominatrix, finished with her taping, began to pummel me, using the heels of her hands to press down hard on my ribs in some twisted burlesque of a massage, some sadistic parody of the Heimlich. She screeched while she did it.

I turned to Marina, my translator, for an explanation. She said that the woman was demonstrating the crushing force of the experience I was about to have, and that she was exhorting me to blunt the impact by "fixing" my muscles at the right moments.

My tormentor reared back anew and once more descended on me, screeching.

Marina screeched in turn. "Fix your muscles!" she cried, a command I took to mean I should tense them. I tensed, and it made a difference. What had been massively unpleasant was now merely obnoxious.

That meant I was ready. And so Marina, the medical workers, and a team of technicians led me toward the world's largest centrifuge—a massive machine secreted in a circular hangar of sorts—to be spun round and round until I proved myself up to the physical travails endured by space travelers, or maybe until I turned into some sort of human pesto.

Speaking of food, some background is in order, and it concerns my strange compulsion to put my body through paces that a body should properly avoid. For starters I lard it, night after night, with foie gras and sweetbreads and pork loin and lamb shoulder, washed down with too many gin martinis and too much Burgundy. It's my duty, literally: I'm the restaurant critic for The New York Times. And I offset this one set of excesses with another, asking my knees to carry me through too many miles of running, my back to support me through too many hours of Pilates. At 42, I should know better.

But I've always pushed myself to extremes. For work or play, I've spent four days in a fetal crouch in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle in southern Iraq and plummeted in a rope harness toward the bottom of a gorge near Victoria Falls. I was a logical candidate for an assignment to mimic some of the training that precedes a trip into space, where more and more civilians are heading. And so I stared down the centrifuge, where the spinning would produce the extra multiples of gravity that astronauts withstand during takeoff and landing. I'd been told that I wouldn't actually feel the movement of the machine, which resembled a gargantuan metal fist on the end of a humongous metal forearm, so motion sickness shouldn't be a concern. It was more common, I'd heard, for someone to black out.