Workout for REAL MEN
Sweating it out the old-fashioned way has far more abs-peal to Colin than the gym
There’s a gym at the bottom of our street, probably just a two-minute brisk walk from our front door. But though people may walk briskly to the gym, they don’t walk briskly back. I’ve just witnessed our neighbour staggering home, pink-faced and breathless, after a session of paid-for punishment.
I noticed him because I was out in our drive, moving a small mountain of firewood into the garage, also perhaps a little pink-faced and breathless. But I still had the energy to ponder the weirdness of modern life, where people strive to keep themselves in shape by attending fitness centres, rather than doing something useful like stacking firewood or vacuuming the house.
Though I say this as a fitness failure, a gym reject. And it’s not as if I haven’t tried. Over the years, for reasons I can’t now entirely recall, I joined gyms, possibly thinking it would do me some sort of good, pull me back from the brink of decrepitude. But all they did was make me bored and grouchy. Gyms seemed to be little more than sophisticated torture chambers filled with menacing equipment.
Well, menacing to me, especially after an altercation with an exercise machine from which I was bodily hurled after turning a knob and accidentally upping my walking speed from amble to stampede. That was probably my last close encounter with a gym. Ever since, I’ve taken my exercise close to home, preferably where, as mentioned, it involves some sort of practical outcome – a cleaner house, a pruned tree, a dug garden.
Though one of the problems with this sort of exercise regime is that you can run out of things to do around the average-sized house on an average-sized section. I occasionally do – to the point where I’ve even considered dispensing with the services of the man who cuts our lawns and trims our tricky hedges to help me get a bit more exercise. But I’d miss him and his unusual ways. As I have previously mentioned, we inherited him when we bought the house three or four years ago. The previous owners said he wasn’t reliable in the usual way, but that he knew what needed doing, just not necessarily when. Which is how it has been ever since. Just when it seems we’re about to be trapped indoors by our runaway garden and rampant hedges, he turns up with his tools and makes everything perfect.
The other unusual advantage of our outdoor man is his reluctance to ever give us a bill for his occasional hard work. In my irregular conversations with him, he likes to mention how people all over our suburb owe him money and, by implication, that means us too. But if I point out he hasn’t invoiced us for a year or so and that perhaps he might like to, he looks amused at the thought.
I might have to look elsewhere for additional exercise options. Perhaps some more bricklaying, though I’ve done quite a bit of that already and, when I think about it, there was a distinct lack of enthusiasm when I recently brought the subject up with the beloved wife. Though it might have been bad timing. She was just back from the gym.
I joined gyms, possibly thinking it would do me some sort of good, pull me back from the brink of decrepitude