Skip to main content

Death and Iron

It's been almost six months since my last post.  Three months ago, if I am honest, I didn't think I would be sitting here now, typing these words.

I thought I would be dead.

I am not going to get into all of the details - not yet, anyway.  I will save all of that for another post, when I am feeling more of a combination of elegiac and poetic, and when I think I'm ready to write about my declining health, and how it has affected my life in ways - often, amazingly - better, but bitter, as well, than I imagined such declining health could.  

But my health has caused some real problems.  Until only a few weeks ago, I haven't been able to write, and I haven't been able to do the one thing I almost love more than anything else I do on this green Earth of God's: lift weights.

But I am writing again.

And I am lifting again.

Hopefully my health will continue to improve even more, which means even more writing and more lifting.  Often, the more I lift, the more I write.  Or maybe it's the other way around.  I don't really know.  But I know that somehow the two are intrinsically intertwined with one another.  It doesn't even matter if I'm not writing about "lifting matters" at the time - the two are still interconnected.
My son Garrett, taken a few month's back.

Last night - while my eldest son Matthew was at the local gym "priming" and "pumping" his chest and arm muscles with a cascade of cacophonously glittering machines - Garrett, my youngest son, and I decided to do nothing but an old-fashioned "grease-the-groove" deadlift routine in our dungeonous garage gym.  It was hot as hell - to use a much cliched term - outside, and one of the overhead lights went out in the garage when we stepped outside, casting an eerie glow over the whole bar-bending event, as we quickly broke into high-humidity-induced sweats.

Iron Maiden serenaded us in the background as the deadlift bar clanged more times than I could count.  Occasionally, the dog next door howled over the proceeds, whether it was from the iron, or the "new wave of British heavy metal" screaming through the speakers, or simply mine and my son's presence, I don't know.

The bottom line: it was good to be alive.  And it was good to be lifting weights.

And it is good to write once more.

Comments

  1. Good to see you writing again! This blog has inspired me a lot. I also enjoy training with my son and it's great to see him get stronger. All the best to you!!! Hope you can get your health fully back.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Feel free to leave us some feedback on the article or any topics you would like us to cover in the future! Much Appreciated!

Popular posts from this blog

Remembering Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris in the late 1980s Some Personal Thoughts and Remembrances on Chuck Norris, Including His Training and Workouts      The essay that follows are some of my personal thoughts and memories on Chuck Norris, including his influence on me as a young martial artist in the early to mid ‘80s, and my own opinions on his training, particularly his lifting workouts, when I look back on it with my current knowledge.  I have done very little research for this post, other than looking up the year a movie was made or the title of a film I may have forgotten, which means that I may be incorrect about a few things—whatever historical mistakes I may have made in what follows, then, I apologize for.  I hope, however, that you find my remembrances informative and, perhaps, entertaining.  I hope my lack of research is made up for in the personal style—I tried to write it as if I was just having a conversation with a friend and telling him about my love of...

The Bodhisattvas of Budo

Fudo Myoo, the "Patron Saint" of Many Japanese swordsmen. Some History and Stories from the “Warrior Saints” of the Martial Ways      Looking back on my life, I often think of my first loves as a child.  Without a doubt, the first thing that I fell in love with was cinema.  In the ‘70s, my dad worked as a film critic for a local newspaper, so he saw everything that came out at the theaters—not as many movies were released back then—and often took me along with him if he thought it was something I would enjoy, sometimes for early screenings before the film was actually released.  I have the fondest memories of the drive-in movie theater only a block away from our house in the Ozark mountains of Farmington, Arkansas.  I can recall seeing Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars in 1977 there as if it was yesterday, along with every single Roger Moore led James Bond film to hit the screen.  It may be hated by critics, but Moonraker...

Marvin Eder’s Mass-Building Methods

  The Many and Varied Mass-Building Methods of Power Bodybuilding’s G.O.A.T. Eder as he appeared in my article "Full Body Workouts" for IronMan  magazine.      In many ways, the essay you are now reading is the one that has had the “longest time coming.”  I have no clue why it has taken me this long to write an article specifically on Marvin Eder, especially considering the fact that I have long considered him the greatest bodybuilder cum strength athlete of all friggin’ time .  In fact, over 20 years ago, I wrote this in the pages of IronMan magazine: In my opinion, the greatest all-around bodybuilder, powerlifter and strength athlete ever to walk the planet, Eder had 19-inch arms at a bodyweight of 198. He could bench 510, squat 550 for 10 reps and do a barbell press with 365. He was reported to have achieved the amazing feat of cranking out 1,000 dips in only 17 minutes. Imagine doing a dip a second for 17 minutes. As Gene Mozee once put ...