Pumping Irony

Craig Cox, EL’s managing editor, chronicles his adventures into the frightening world of middle-age exercise.

Monthly Archives: December 2010

Hurts So Good

By Craig Cox / December 28, 2010

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 old joke:

Patient: “Doc, it hurts when
I try to straighten my arm.”

Doctor: “I know how to cure
that.”

Patient: “How.”

Doctor: “Don’t straighten
your arm.”

Or something to that effect.

So, I spent the morning periodically
stretching the offending arm and then did what any ordinary guy would do when
his left arm is hurting and the rational sector of his brain is telling him to
take it easy: I went to the gym. Not to do more bench presses, but to conduct
an experiment.

Yesterday, while walking
home from work, I was crossing an intersection when a car making a left turn
forced me to jog out of harm’s way. For most people, this is no big deal unless
the guy driving the car is having a bad day and hurls an expletive or two and
then you feel like maybe you did something wrong and your self-esteem plummets
for an instant before it all turns into anger and then you feel like you maybe
haven’t evolved sufficiently to overcome some random event that other people
would just shrug off (we’ve all been there…). But faithful readers of these
pages will recall that I haven’t done any running of any kind since last
summer, when my left knee developed a nasty case of bursitis. I’ve been walking
a couple of miles a day since November, so I knew my knee was improving, but
when I jogged across that street yesterday I couldn’t help but notice that
there was no pain. None.

(This raises an interesting
question: Maybe the body moves pain around. Maybe my knee was just waiting for
me to mess up my left arm, so it could transfer my current ration of pain up
there. And if I want my left arm to heal, I should sprain my ankle or
something. It’s just a theory at this point.)

So, despite my aching arm, I
headed to the gym this afternoon thinking that maybe my knee is ready for running.
I loosened up on the Elliptical Death Machine for 10 minutes, then climbed onto
the dreadmill and began walking. After a minute or so, I cranked the speed up
to 4 MPH and broke into a jog. No pain. Just that familiar tightness in my
right calf — like an old friend who visits whenever he needs money. Still, this is good, I’m thinking. I mean, good
in a relative way, given that I hate
running and hate running on the dreadmill even more.

If there’s anything more
boring than running on the dreadmill it’s running on the dreadmill at a very
slow speed. Most of us, I’d venture, are wired to cover a certain distance when
we run — you know, a mile, 5K, 10K, 26.2 miles, etc. — but when you’re slogging
along at 4 MPH, it takes a long, long
time to get to the finish line. Even when it’s only a mile away.

But I was not experiencing
any pain, really, so I figured I might as well run a mile. If you do the math,
though, you’ll know that covering that distance at 4 MPH takes about three
weeks, and even the best episode of Judge
Judy playing on the flat-screen TVs across the room gets fairly tiresome by
the time you hit the home stretch.

Still, running a mile at any
speed on my once-bothersome left knee is nothing to sneeze at, so I left the
gym feeling pretty good about myself. We’ll see how the knee feels tomorrow,
but I’m optimistic: If it’s all swollen up when I get out of bed tomorrow,
there’s a good chance that my arm will be back to normal.

Ya Say Ya Want a Resolution . . .

By Craig Cox / December 27, 2010

I’ve been avoiding the gym
these past couple of weeks so that I could make a resolution to get back to the
gym in 2011. And guess what? After resolving to get back to the gym, I squeezed
in a nice workout this afternoon.

So, it’s not even New Year’s
Day yet and I’ve already met my goal for 2011!

Actually, I’m not big on the
whole New Year’s resolutions thing. I’m a Minnesotan, after all, and we like to
think that if you do the best you can, you’re doing OK. That doesn’t mean you
shouldn’t have some goals in life, it just means you shouldn’t obsess about
them. Just plug away; that’s how we roll.

Plenty of experts, in fact,
will tell you that the best way to sustain a fitness regimen is to incorporate it
into your everyday life: take the bus instead of driving, walk the dog every
morning, schedule your workouts just as you would any business meeting or
social obligation, pack a healthy lunch for work, yadda, yadda. Just plug away.
Don’t make a big deal out of it.

Last January, I ran into an
old friend of mine and her partner down at the gym. They were huffing and
puffing on the treadmill and proudly announced to me that they were determined
this year to get into shape at all costs. I wished them well, and cautioned
them about doing too much too soon. A couple days later I ran into them again.
They were working out every day, my friend told me — cardio, strength training,
stretching, the whole nine yards. That was great, I replied. But you might want
to take a day off from time to time, I suggested. Recovery time is important,
too.

A few weeks later, they were
still at it. Grinding it out each day like a couple of boot campers. But their
resolve was weakening. The weight wasn’t melting off the way they had imagined
it would. And the treadmill was getting pretty tedious, she confessed. Might be
time to take a few days off, I said. But the idea didn’t seem to register.

I haven’t seen them at the
gym at all for several months now, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve
thrown in the towel. (They could say they haven’t seen me at the gym much
lately, either.) But, I suspect they took my advice and took a few days off –
days that stretched into months. It’s easy to do, believe me.

That’s why we have a new
year every 12 months: so folks can resolve to get back into shape, to eat
better, to be nicer to their friends, to finish reading that sprawling novel by
the young Czech writer whose name you can’t pronounce but whose prose was so
riveting when you cracked the book open at the cabin last summer but whose magnum opus has now been
sitting on the coffee table beneath a stack of yellowing National Geographics since August. We live for these challenges,
right?

And if a New Year’s
resolution helps motivate you to achieve these kinds of goals, then I say go
for it. Whatever works is my motto. And, for me, that means continuing to plug
away. It felt good to get to the gym today. I might even go again tomorrow.

In Praise of Anonymity

By Craig Cox / December 6, 2010

Wednesday’s workout left me with some nasty DOMS (delayed
onset muscle soreness), so I decided to take it easy Friday night — avoiding
The Pit in favor of some serious cardio work. I found a vacant Elliptical Death
Machine facing a TV screen showing Hardball
with Chris Matthews and settled into burning off the burrito I had for lunch. I
cranked the resistance up to 10 and waited for something to go wrong.

But unlike my last bout with the EDM, when my knee didn’t
seem to want to travel in a straight line above my toes — angling rather in a
(coincidentally?) elliptical pattern accompanied
by a mysterious jabbing pain — tonight it pumped up and down like a well-oiled
piston. There’s no explaining such things without an MRI, I suppose, so I
decided to just chalk it up to the added lycopene in the pico de gallo that
spiced up my lunch. So I cranked it up to 15 and then all the way up to 20 and
kept at it for a full 30 minutes while Matthews let Ron Reagan Jr. wax poetic
on how Obama was getting rolled by congressional Republicans.

Seeing the former president’s namesake on the screen
reminded me again how easily celebrity waxes and wanes in our culture, and I
was momentarily struck by the fact that I was probably never going to ascend
even to the modest level of notoriety that would earn some B-list politico like
Ron Jr. 90 seconds on CNN. This delivered a glancing blow to my ego, until I
recalled how I’d once been interviewed by someone at the Star Tribune, who asked me what I’d wish for if I could wish for
anything and I said something about taking batting practice with the Twins or
having lunch with Barbara Flanagan. The Twins, of course, never called, but
Flanagan, the legendary society reporter/schmoozer, did and we wound up having
a lovely lunch at a now-defunct bistro on First Avenue, after which I could
never make fun of her again.

All of which is just another way of saying how great it is that
the gym has these big flat-screen TVs lined up in front of the cardio machines.
They can just transport you out of your aching body in a way no other appliance
really can. Was my knee aching? My calves cramped? Who knows? I was back at a
table at Faegre’s in 1986 grazing on French fries and listening with great
interest to the gravely-voiced Flanagan describe her days on the crime beat and
how back then every editor had a bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer.

Nostalgia can be a wonderful thing, even without flat-screen
TVs, but my calf was beginning to cramp up, so I ambled over to the stretching
area and decided, quite out of the blue, to try rolling out some of the kinks
in my hammies and calves with a foam roller. For those of you unfamiliar with
the foam roller, it’s a cylindrical piece of fairly stiff foam, about 6 inches
in diameter. The idea is to kind of sit on top of it and pass your cramping
muscles over it, a motion that, I’m told, will smooth those knots right out.

Regular readers of these pages will know that I’m not the
sort of guy who tries a lot of new things in the gym. Just not the cut of my
jib. Find a routine that works and just keep doing it until you hurt yourself –
that’s my motto. But once you make up your mind to strike out in some
intriguing new direction, it’s imperative that you do so in such a way that appears that you do this all the dang
time. So, when I strode confidently into the closet where I assumed they would
store the foam rollers and found only a short, semi-circular chunk of foam, I
naturally picked it up as if it was the precise piece of equipment I needed for
my well-practiced routine.

I set the hunk of foam on a vacant mat and placed my
hamstring atop it in what I guessed might be a strategic location and with some
effort scraped back and forth between my gluteus maximus and the back of my
knee. After a few futile repetitions, I happened to notice a few foam rollers
tucked neatly into a nearby shelf and, taking the time to complete my
“routine,” I put the useless hunk of foam to the side and replaced it with the
real thing.

Most fitness experts will tell you that no matter how dumb
you look trying to do stuff at the gym, most folks tend to ignore you, unless
you’re a celebrity or something. I always try to hold onto that thought when
I’m working out. Anonymity is not such a bad thing after all.

Plenty in Reserve

By Craig Cox / December 1, 2010

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. For the most part, it’s
holding up pretty well. No limping, no real stiffness, and my commute has been mostly
pain-free. I’m not quite ready to grab my tennis racket and get back out on the
court, but I’m relieved to know that my aging body has retained its self-healing
powers.

So, here’s my prescription for knee rehab: Forget the knee replacement. Dial back your
more physical athletic pursuits, but keep moving as much as you can and tap into
your physiologic reserve for as long as possible.

OK, that last part was not part of my original rehab plan. I borrowed it
from a recent Jane Brody column in the NYT.
Brody interviews Mark Lachs, MD, director of geriatrics at the
NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System and author of Treat Me, Not My Age (Viking, 2010), who describes how each of us
is born with more capacity than our organs and general biological systems need
to operate. We have, for instance, billions of brain cells we’ll never use and
way more kidney and liver and heart capabilities than we typically need to
function properly.

But we begin dipping into those reserves in our 20s –
when muscle strength peaks for most people — and it can begin to run pretty low
once your hit your 80s and 90s, Lachs says. This was not a big issue in the
good old days when folks routinely kicked off in their 50s and 60s, but Western
medicine now has ways to keep most of us vertical well into our 80s (indeed,
some experts are predicting that centenarians will become rather common among
my children’s generation) and, as Lachs puts it, “Millions of people have
survived long enough to keep a date with immobility.”

The good news is that you can tweak your routine at
almost any age and slow the depletion of your physiologic reserves. Lachs cites
a 2004 study in which a group of elderly patients recovering from a hip
fracture increased their walking speed, balance and muscle strength simply by
performing a few basic strengthening exercises. Something as simple a daily
walk can make a difference between mobility into your 90s or disability at 60,
he says. “Even the smallest interventions can produce substantial benefits.”

I like this approach, because it gives all of us hope
that we can improve our quality of life as we age rather than cave in to the
conventional thinking that says, “Hey! You’re old and creaky. Get used to it!”

I may be old and creaky, but next spring I’ll be back
out on the tennis court — older, yes; creakier, not so much.

Pumping Irony

Monthly Archives: December 2010

Hurts So Good

Trackbacks

Ya Say Ya Want a Resolution . . .

Trackbacks

In Praise of Anonymity

Trackbacks

Plenty in Reserve

Trackbacks

A BLOG BY

Subscribe by Email

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Meta