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…

I married into a family cabin almost 30 years ago, which is a marvelous happenstance, except for the October Saturday every year when My Lovely Wife and I are called upon to drive 200 miles north to Cass County, Minn., for the annual bringing in of the dock.

For months now, I’ve been struggling to find ways to “mix up” my workout routine. Loyal readers may recall my foray onto the basketball court awhile back or my occasional yoga adventures. Well, now that I’m everyone’s favorite tennis opponent, the problem isn’t so…

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.

OK, let’s see if I can do a little inventory of sore muscles this morning: lower back, check; both knees, check; right shoulder, check; quads, check; hammies, check; left ankle . . . . Maybe it would take less space…

True to my word (see previous post), I actually did pedal over to the local yoga studio with My Lovely Wife yesterday for a noon beginner’s class. And it went fine — except for the Eagle Pose, which probably takes…

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

“Rabbit grabs the rebound but then can’t move with it, his body weighs a ton, his feet have lost their connection to his head. Tiger knifes in between him and the basket, leans right in his face with a violet…

I'm thinking this morning about that old saying about the best-laid plans often going astray.

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.

My eldest sibling likes to remind those of us who envy his retirement lifestyle that the one big problem with life after work is that "every day is a Saturday," which is to say a day in which you tend to go shopping, have lunch or dinner out and generally open your wallet on more occasions than you might otherwise do so.

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…

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,…

So, I skipped the gym on Friday but made up for it on Saturday. Not on the lifting front -- unless you count flipping burgers on the grill (yum!) -- but I got plenty of cardio.

I was back in the Pit Monday, lifting and sweating and feeling generally OK about this fitness thing, when I ran into Robyn Wells, an LTF personal trainer who I met recently through my rugby-playing colleague JS. Robyn is a 20-something powerhouse athlete who specializes in teaching us lesser beings how to get the most out of their workouts. And she generously offered to help me out.

Day 6 of the Great Food Chronicle Experiment has now come and gone, and one very clear pattern has emerged: I don't seem to eat very much.

No offense, Tony. As promised, I’ve spent the last few days faithfully chronicling my entire food intake, an exercise that has forced me to become a bit more mindful of my eating decisions even as it has revealed how circumstances…

The other day as I was standing on the scale at the gym (164.5 lbs.), it occurred to me for maybe the 7,000th time (estimated) that I've never had to really think about my weight.

It's been raining mornings and evenings the last two days, thus deleting my bicycle commute (My Lovely Wife has been driving me to and from), so I was anxious to get down to the gym tonight and rev up a good lather on the old EDM and see if my Thursday experience with the free weights was an anomaly.