If you have a basement gym, you might as well use it

Over the last year, I've gotten a lot of mileage here on the blog posting about my adventures at the gym.

I was never a weight lifter until May 2024, when Elissa and Mark bought me four sessions with a trainer named Kirk at Ohio Sports & Fitness (OSF) in Willoughby, Ohio. My knowledge and enjoyment of strength training really blossomed under Kirk's guidance, and I enjoyed working out with him twice a week almost without fail for 13 full months.

As of a month ago, however, I no longer go to OSF, nor is Kirk serving as my trainer. This has nothing to do with the gym or with Kirk. The facility is great with a lot of friendly and very helpful people. As for Kirk, what can I say? He's an amazing personal trainer whose extensive knowledge blends well with his positive personality.

He's a good egg, that Kirk.

No, my disengagement from the gym has nothing to do with them. It was simply a decision I made several weeks ago when I decided I needed to free up some time in my otherwise hectic life (something I mentioned this past Monday in an egregiously gratuitous game show-related post).

One of the changes I made in my routine was to shift the site of my twice-a-week strength training to our house rather than an outside gym.

It turns out we have a pretty nicely equipped gym in the back room of our basement, thanks to the efforts of my son Jared. When we still lived with us and was really into lifting, he stocked that room with everything you really need to build muscle.

That includes two adjustable weight benches, a rack for bench pressing, a barbell and various weight plates, a full assortment of dumbbells, a machine for hamstring curls and quad extensions, and a bunch of other stuff I won't even list here, all placed on a series of heavy-duty rubber horse mats.

For the longest time I felt guilty I wasn't taking advantage of this nice exercise setup located right in my own home. Now I do.

I admittedly miss Kirk, and I miss the atmosphere at OSF, but so far this change has been for the better. It cuts significant time off my morning routine, and it doesn't involve any sort of membership or personal training fees.

It also helps that my strength training goals are relatively modest. I'm not looking to bulk up or anything. Really, all I want is to maintain what I have in an attempt to stave off age-related muscle loss.

The Tennant Gym is more than equipped to help me do that.

Now if only I could get a machine for the basement that makes me not want to eat cake all the time...

I try so hard to find stuff in my own house before I finally resort to calling Terry

 

No stereotype is universal, but some are pretty close.

One, in my experience, is that men are curiously unable to find things. Things that are right there in plain sight. Things that seem impossible to miss.

Yet I manage to do it.

Please understand, this is not for lack of trying. When Terry sends me to the basement to fetch something, I go down there with every intention of not looking like an idiot.

"Get me the big blue bowl," she will say. "It's behind the folding door, second shelf from the bottom, right next to the Christmas cookie cutters."

"That sounds easy enough," I think to myself. "Folding door, second shelf from the bottom, next to the Christmas cookie cutters. Got it!"

I make my way to the basement, slide open the folding door and kneel down to get a good look at the second shelf from the bottom.

No big blue bowl.

I look again. Still not there.

I move some things around on the shelf. Nada.

I look on other shelves, thinking maybe she just had the wrong one in mind. Again, nothing you could remotely describe as a big blue bowl.

I go back to the second shelf from the bottom. The situation there is unchanged. There are many things on that shelf, but as far as I can tell, nothing big, nor blue, nor bowl-like.

I head back upstairs to report that she is perhaps mistaken and ask her to think where else the big blue bowl might be.

"It's there," she tells me. "Look harder."

Annoyed, I go back to the basement, knowing the big blue bowl isn't suddenly going to appear out of thin air. And of course I am right. There is no big blue bowl on the second shelf from the bottom.

I yell up to her that she's welcome to come down and see for herself that the bowl is not where she believes it to be. As she comes down the stairs, I imagine the heartfelt apology she will offer when she discovers I am right.

She strides over, bends down, looks at the second shelf from the bottom and...pulls out a very big, decidedly blue bowl and stares at me for a moment.

I am dumbfounded. Gobsmacked, even. I don't understand it. I was looking right at it the whole time. But it never registered. I never saw it. It just...well, I blame my brain, which clearly doesn't understand what a "big blue bowl" is and has failed me yet again.

Terry shakes her head slightly and takes the bowl upstairs.

I pull out my phone to Google "treatments for cognitive impairment."

Somehow, after 31 years, we're still married.

You have reached a certain age when new basement flooring makes you giddy

 

We're undertaking what I suppose you could call a basement renovation. The two main projects are repainting the walls and replacing the flooring.

The flooring part is already finished. We pulled up the vinyl flooring and stone tile that were there previously and replaced them with Nature Stone, which is an interesting mixture of rocks and epoxy that looks beautiful and makes the whole basement look lighter. We love it.

And that's the thing. There's nothing inherently cool or lovable about flooring.

And yet...there kind of is.

But apparently you have to be middle-aged before you can get truly excited about it.

The guys who installed it did so in two separate sessions, each lasting just a few hours. As our Nature Stone sales guy Larry D. described it, it's "the consistency of a milkshake" when they put it in. I didn't watch, but I think they just pour it onto the floor, smooth it out, and 24 hours later it's completely dry and you can walk on it.

This is amazing to me. I don't know how amazing it would have been to my 20-year-old self, but 51-year-old Scott is gobsmacked by it.

I also don't know whether to mourn my lost youth or celebrate the perspective that comes with getting a few years under your belt.

I'm going with both.