I probably have 45 minutes more of cleanup. Then a trip to the firewood place to change all the pieces with metal embedded in them (why?).
Since you probably don’t know too many 67-year-old guys in a position to move and stack 6,000 pounds of firewood in under three hours, I’ll give you a little backstory: I accidentally got strong during a year off from university, working a job that, well, made me stronger. I didn’t realize it until I got to Maine for summer camp season. Unloading the campers’ trunks from a truck, I noticed that my fellow counselors, fresh from classes, were struggling with some of them. I, on the other hand, was flinging them onto my shoulder like they were nothing. As an artist, I had never interested myself much in physicality, but that, I thought, was cool. So I’ve tried to stay in shape.
Thirty years later, waiting for the ass-dragging Canadians to approve our residence (we finally gave up on it, for which I have been very grateful recently), I drove from Spokane to Las Vegas to meet an old friend coming from New Jersey for a conference. He was, as usual, overweight, and commented on how fit I seemed. He took a picture of me with my shirt off as we wandered around in the desert.
I thought I looked pretty good, so posted it, where smart-ass Jewish high school senior MySpace friend from San Diego responded almost immediately: Eww! Old. (jk).
At that point I saw a reality of being middle-aged, that in the absence of actively building muscle mass I would be losing muscle mass with each year. I joined the YMCA for a while, only to discover how incredibly boring gym machines are (and got ringworm from the sauna). Then I found and bought The Miracle Seven: 7 Amazing Exercises that Slim, Sculpt, and Build the Body in 20 Minutes a Day.
I could feel change in my muscles after a week, and I’ve been doing them ever since. Move and stack 6,000 pounds of firewood in under three hours? No problem.
(I solved the sauna issue by buying one through our company as a medial write-off.)
