Lesson on Youth

Although recently posted, the event of which I speak in this article actually occurred in May of 2005. I give it here to serve as an example of the content that we send out in our e-mail updates.

I have never before had such a grim reminder of age as I have had this past week. As the pastor and I sat together at McDonald's after the Wednesday night service, he invited me to go to the gym with him the next morning. The last time I had accompanied him to the gym, we played basketball, a rare opportunity for me. I was eager to go until he informed me that Thursday was his day to lift weights. This will be hard for most who know me to believe, but I have never been a weightlifter. Running, yes; basketball, yes; volleyball, yes; weightlifting, count me out. I told my wife before I married her that physiologists assert that men have a pair of muscles called pectoralis major. In my case, I informed her, I have pectoralis minor. Accordingly, I did not want to embarrass myself by showing the pastor how weak I really am when it comes to weightlifting, and I told him so. He assured me that there would be no embarrassment and I consented to join him.I was the second one to show up at the gym the next morning, arriving ten minutes early at 5:20. The men getting of their vehicles looked they would be more challenged to bench press their cars rather than anything the gym could contain. One man's arms were bigger than my legs. The pastor's words echoed in my ears, "No embarrassment." It was not long before the pastor showed and we began his morning routine. It began with two laps around the gym at a brisk walk. I can do a brisk walk. Before long, however, the laps were over and we began working on various exercise machines. The pastor always went first with each routine. Allow me here to identify the pastor as Marc Monte. He stands at least two inches taller than I, and outweighs me by 100 pounds. Simple physics and probability told me that there was no way I could lift as much weight as he could. Still, he was impressed with what I did lift. It wasn't long before I began to be impressed as well. For example, after finishing a set of 13 reps on what he called a military bench press, he informed me that when he started, he had lifted less than half of what I had done. Although most of the routine was done on machines, we did some exercises with free weights. One of them was called a walking lunge. For the walking lunge, I carried fifty pounds of excess weight - the same as Pastor Monte. In what he called a power lift, I lifted fifty pounds less than he. From what I can discern, I had my own body weight on my shoulders, and was lifting it with my legs. When it came to lifting with my stomach muscles, I was only limited by my own body weight - pulling myself off the ground rather than lifting the prescribed weight. Yes, I had grossly underestimated my own strength! Between each set of twelve reps on the various machines, we took another lap at a brisk walk. After about an hour and fifteen minutes of working out, we joined two teenage boys from the church for a game of basketball. Forty minutes later, we headed home.

It felt so good to have had strenuous exercise, especially when I knew that it was a total body workout. A few hours later, however, my overly healthy ego became seriously ill. It should have been no problem at all -- a routine I had performed thousands of time with no problem. Yet the intensity of the pain in my legs as I attempted to rise from a seated position was a harbinger of trouble to come. The next morning, ego died. The only muscle in my body that was not sore was my jaw. As I attempted to rise from bed, I found to my chagrin, that my wife had tethered bowling balls to my lower appendages. Nor was lifting my legs possible without intense pain. Instinctively, I called upon my arms to help me sit up in bed. Alas, they too, had fallen victim. It was small comfort now that I had doubled the initial lifting weight of a 250 pound man on my first attempt. Somehow, the man who owned the gym had managed to reattach all that weight to my arms while I was sleeping! I was barely able to move all day long. Routine chores became painful and slow. While working on the trailer, I found myself thinking hard to achieve maximum efficiency. I wanted to make sure that while I was kneeling I got everything done that needed to be done - I didn't think that, assuming I was able to resume a standing position, I could make it to my knees again. Nor was my wife any comfort. The Ozarks of southern Missouri still echo with her guffaws. I thought the soreness had greatly abated. I had not felt any for several hours. Then we stopped at a rest area, and I was obliged to get out of the truck. I nearly collapsed in a week-old puddle of diesel fuel deposited in the rest area by some unknown trucker. Throughout the day, another one of Pastor Monte's assurances recrossed my mind: "No pain, no gain." If the pain is any indication of how much I gained, I should be, by now, a shrewd combination of Atlas and Arnold Swartzenegger. This fact alone might have been enough to revive ego, except that our bedroom mirror offers ample evidence to the contrary. The only difference now in my pectoralis minor is that they are painful and minor. My legs still remind me of a malnourished flamingo, and my arms are as big around as crab legs. Worse, though I am not yet thirty, I feel as if my threescore and ten expired long ago. Sarah is urging me to join a club, such as the YMCA, evidently in an effort to perpetuate my semi-paralytic condition. There is, however, an upside. For the first time since I began pulling my trailer, the retirees in their RVs at Flying J accepted me as one of them.