Pumping Irony

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I typically put my bicycle away each fall when the first snow flies and start pedaling again when the streets are clear in the spring. It’s an act of self-preservation, I suppose, and a nod to convention. I can walk to work. And for longer trips, there’s always the…

Mr. Parkour (AKA my son) has been on a bit of a fitness jag this week and, because I’m the kind of guy who wants to support healthy habits, my poor, aging body has been pretty sore. Tuesday night, for example, I was sitting in my comfy chair, sipping a cup of tea and reading…

I had a curious urge this past weekend to pull on my sneakers and go jogging down West River Road. This is not something I typically think about doing on a gray Saturday afternoon with the temps in the 20s and the sidewalks fitted with a greasy mix of slush and ice, but the thought did actually occur to…

True to form, I overdid it a little yesterday at the gym (gotta scale back my reps on those 350-pound bench presses), and today I’m paying for it. I think I strained a bicep or something on my left arm because I can’t really straighten it out without feeling some pain. Reminds me of an…

Winter has arrived in the form of wet snow and icy sidewalks, so I've retired my bicycle for the duration and have been making the 1-mile trek across the river to my office on foot. I do this each morning with some trepidation, but my knee seems to be improving.

I’ve been battling a bit of a cold for the past few weeks, somehow managing to keep it at bay with a regular regimen of sleep, vitamins, and the occasional intervention of Echinacea and homeopathic aconite. All in the service of buttressing my 59-year-old immune system. As the Zen monk said as he fell from the…

There’s a scene in Shane, one of my favorite westerns, in which the gunslinger Shane (played by Alan Ladd) and the homesteader Joe Starrett (Van Heflin) do battle with a gnarly old stump in Starrett’s dusty front yard. They go after it with axes for a while and, when they see it’s weakening, they just start pushing…

A week ago, this knee thing had me a little worried, but it’s been improving pretty steadily in the past few days, to the point that Saturday’s annual taking-in-the-dock ritual didn’t even do it in. I think I’ve written before about this little exercise: yanking heavy metal stanchions out of the frigid water, pulling up…

I’m not a guy who visits the doctor very often (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it), but I do enjoy reading about the Big Medical Breakthroughs that seem to surface in the newspaper every week or so. It’s comforting somehow to know that there are folks out there working 24/7 to cure the various…

I’ve been having a little trouble getting to the gym lately, so a recent article in Science Daily that delved into the mysteries of motivation caught my attention. The piece describes some interesting new research at the University of Illinois that suggests we should be asking ourselves whether we’re going to get something done rather than telling ourselves to do it.…

Mr. Parkour and I paid a visit last night to Gleason’s Gym, a sprawling gymnastics center artfully hidden in a suburban industrial park just south of the city. This was not my idea, but I tagged along with my housemate/former child out of curiosity and a faint notion that I should be supporting his newly won interest in fitness. You’d…

The other night, I was standing in the kitchen minding my own business when my son, whom I now refer to as Mr. Parkour, walked in to inquire about something or other, and while awaiting my response grabbed the molding above the door and cranked out a couple of modified pull-ups. Then, my daughter, who’s always been known…

My son and I traveled to the fancy gym in the suburbs last night for a workout.

Winter is giving way to spring around here, which makes my morning and evening walking commutes both exhilarating and treacherous. Patches of ice materialize at inopportune times, so mindful walking is the order of the day: one foot in front of the other. I've managed to maintain my footing so far, unlike My Lovely Wife, who has taken a couple of tumbles this winter.

After WWII, my father found a job delivering beer to bars and restaurants and liquor stores in St. Paul. This involved schlepping a lot of heavy kegs and cases from his truck to coolers every day, an activity that, over the years, made him a pretty strong dude. I was thinking about that today, after…

I was sweating my way through some overhead presses Monday night, when a curious thing happened: I had upped the load to 170 lbs. after a few trial lifts at lower weights, and actually managed to hoist it up there to a point where I could lock my elbows and take a breath. This is a…

I think I mentioned a while ago that my gym got a makeover recently — they really spiffed up the joint, but they relocated the scale in a mysterious place, so I hadn’t been weighing myself. Well, Monday night I finally located it and sheepishly climbed aboard, expecting the worst. Much to my surprise, the…

An old colleague of mine, who I like to call The Captain (our Air Force careers briefly overlapped in 1970), dropped me a note the other day with an interesting query: Why does he always seem to come up with such great ideas when he’s out on his bicycle cranking his way up some torturous hill? What’s happening…

My Lovely Wife and I got married on Facebook this evening. She, sitting comfortably in her favorite chair across the living room from me in my favorite chair, noticed in a bit of a panic that she’d not identified her husband on her Facebook page and quickly remedied the situation with a few keystrokes before giving me that look…

It’s definitely December now (a balmy 24 degrees this morning), so I’ve parked my bicycle in the garage for the next four months and will begin my day with a walking commute up the street to the train station, across Hiawatha Avenue, through Minnehaha Park (stopping to admire how the falls freeze from the bottom up), across the Intercity Bridge…

Loyal readers of these pages (yes, you two know who you are) know me to be a bit random in my workout approach.