Pumping Irony

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.

It used to be that the second day after basketball I’d really feel the pain (it’s called DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness), but I was surprised yesterday morning to find that I wasn’t hobbling around as much as I thought I might. It’s all relative, of course, but aside from a mysterious twinge at the top of my left…

Well, of course I played basketball last night — despite a weird twinge in my left knee and a general whole-body soreness from Sunday's tennis match/basketball shoot-around. (What did you expect?)

Craig Cox weighs the pros and cons of shooting hoops at the club.

I strive on a fairly regular basis to reduce my natural obliviousness to things (it’s a guy thing), but I do not always succeed. Take Tuesday’s workout, for instance. I’d been avoiding the gym during the latter phases of its renovation — it was actually closed for a few days last week — so when I showed up after…

My father died 30 years ago today, so some of my siblings and I (along with my daughter) will be marking the occasion later this afternoon at a tiny cemetery in Becker, Minn., where he and my mother are buried — along with a large contingent of the Cox clan (including my grandfather and great-grandfather). There will be much reminiscing…

Just back from my fourth acupuncture session, during which I noticed that the cicadas between my ears had shifted slightly to the right (an ominous sign for the Obama administration?), leaving my left ear mostly quiet.

I'm sitting at my desk on my front porch this morning watching the October rain threaten to become snow, the kind of weather that correlates nicely with my current mood: Is the bug that hit me yesterday going to morph into something more serious today?

A gorgeous autumn morning for a bike ride. The trees along the Mississippi are beginning to turn and the squirrels in Minnehaha Park are frantically building their winter food cache. The chill in the air gives me permission to pump a little harder on my way over the bridge and up the big hill to the office, but I…

Back to the gym last night after a couple of weeks away, and I have to admit I was a little apprehensive when I climbed on the scale before my workout.

Before Monday's workout, I'd been away from the gym for a couple of weeks (vacation + procrastination), and I'm feeling the effects today: sore shoulders and arms from lifting, mostly.

I put about 20 miles on the Schwinn on Saturday, running various errands with My Lovely Wife.

The holiday weekend lacked fireworks, though our neighbor outfitted his front yard with a red, white and blue light show featuring the music of John Phillip Sousa, Bruce Springsteen and Ray Charles (the latter singing his own stirring rendition of "America the Beautiful"), which debuted the evening of July 3 with much fanfare and, perhaps owing to a visit or two from less patriotic neighbors, did not favor us with an Independence Day encore.

So, as promised in my earlier post, I’m reporting back. And as I suspected, I haven’t been able to get to the gym every day on a regular schedule since then, but I have been getting in some good workouts when I’ve been down there. Most notably, I’ve taken my young PT’s advice about lengthening…

It’s been about a week now since I made it downstairs to the gym (lots of evening work recently), so I can’t say I’ve been very diligent on the exercise front. I have been bicycling into the office every day, a practice that has been made more challenging by winds that have threatened to sweep…