Sick

The restraint needed to curb my post-smoking diet of peanut butter and beer ...

The awkward early stages of acclimating to the gym locker room, mastering sweat towel etiquette and learning how to run on a treadmill ...

The aches and pains following exercise my body hasn't felt the likes of since high school gym class ...

The embarrassment and sense of mortality after pulling a muscle leg-lifting 20 pounds ...

All that I have been through since quitting smoking in early 2008, the weight gain and struggle for physical reclamation, and it turns out none of it can hold a flame to a bad cold.

I have not been to the gym since first feeling the snotty symptoms more than three weeks ago, and I am now down to my smoker's weight of 168 pounds.

Never mind that this cold is sapping energy and appetite and shedding pounds, probably most of them muscle. I look great, if I don't say so my own damn self.

It's a persistent bug - the longest cold I can recall sniffling through.

There's a rattle when I breathe deep, frequent nose picking and waking with an incredibly dry and sore throat, which is probably due to a stopped-up nose and heavy mouth-breathing while asleep.

I stopped taking any over-the-counter meds because they correlated with a weird bitter taste on my lips and fingertips. I tried to find out what this could mean and only found unbridled hysteria in online chatrooms as people around the world with similar symptoms all but convinced each other they carried a new strain of plague.

Meanwhile, I have taken to the couch and watched every episode of 30 Rock that I could find at my neighbourhood video store.

The gym seems as remote as a sunny beach. The longer I stay away, the more difficult it is to return. I am not in the habit.

But the sickness will pass, my appetite will return and I will be forced to choose: Sit on the couch and grow another chin; or get to the gym. I suspect vanity will win out. 

A regular

I have crossed over.

From bemused observer to garish spectacle.

From the guy who sniped from a slow-moving treadmill - "Hey, look at the old guy wheezing on the elliptical. Look at Bobby shortpants with the high socks, ha, ha, ha. Oh, and shhh, look over there at the guy so muscly he can't move his arms" - to an object of mockery.

Once a cynical outsider sent to observe the wildlife, I am now as much a part of the gym's flora and fauna as bad techno and those faded, signed posters of B- and C-list actors and athletes.

Yesterday, without even hesitating, I emerged from the locker room in a white T-shirt that my energy-efficient dryer has made too small, dark grey socks that I had worn to a funeral earlier in the day and  Bermuda shorts/swim trunks. The light blue shorts actually depict a map of Bermuda and other islands. Get it? Bermuda shorts? (I bought them for $9 at a J.Crew store in the States during the absolute bottom of the ecomomic collapse last year.)

In a floor-to-ceiling mirror, I caught an image of the ensemble and realized how undiscriminating I had been. A couple exercisers tried not to stare.

For a moment I wondered what they were thinking but quickly decided I didn't care. I was comfortable in my Bermuda shorts. I am comfortable at the gym.

I am now a shameless regular.

One against 73,000

I aim to work out this week more than usual.

I have a reason.

I'm a little scared of something that's coming up. Actually, a lot scared.

On Sunday I am going to a place where grown men, and women, bark. Not at each other but at the scene unfolding in the green bowl below.

These people wear masks, transforming into over-sized, rabid bulldogs.

They wear brown and orange.

The testerone, and the alcohol-soaked hopelessness, will be plainly seen and felt - in the beer line, in the line-up for the washroom, even in the parking lot.

In my time in various NFL stadiums, I have heard death threats rain down on those stupid enough to wear the colours of the opposing team. I have heard epithets that rhyme the name of the opposing team with the perceived sexual orientation of the person wearing that team's jersey. I have considered peeing my own pants instead of jostling for elbow room with 250-pound factory workers lining up at the trough.

This Sunday I am going to Cleveland to watch my favourite team, the Minnesota Vikings, play the Browns. I think I am sitting in a section known as the Dawg Pound.

If you're a hardcore football fan like I am, if you feel only relief or despair on Sundays, if you are a regular visitor to your team's hometown newspaper NFL blog, if you can tolerate TV people like Shannon Sharpe and Keyshawn Johnson and Ron Jaworski tell you what the game is about, and if it's rare that your favourite team plays within a four-and-a-half-hour drive, then you go to Cleveland.

Here's the problem, why I want my reflexes a little more tuned, my muscles a little more pumped:

When my team does something good on the field, I will be that guy dumb enough to rise from a crowd of 73,000 enemy and scream my approval. I can't help it. And I am afraid that when told to shut up or sit down or called a Vi-Queen, I will blurt "Suck it!" or "Brady Quinn has an IQ of 23" or some such. And then it's anyone's guess what will happen. But I should be ready.

No basketball in midtown

My brother-in-law has always loved playing basketball.

 

But now he lives in a Hong Kong neighbourhood where opportunities for a pick-up game are somewhere between slim and none.

 

He is visiting Toronto for a few weeks and wants to play.

 

So, from where he is staying near the upscale Yonge and Eglinton neighbourhood, we set out yesterday to find a ball.

 

We didn't need a $100 leather ball or one endorsed by the NBA or one blessed by LeBron himself. Just a regulation-size basketball. Shouldn't be hard, you would think, in a city that is home to an NBA franchise.

 

We headed to one of the biggest sports stores in the area. It has the word "Sport" in its name.

 

I weaved through the tables and racks displaying $100 T-shirts and could not find a basketball. I asked a guy wearing a name tag. Eager to please but completely confounded, he panicked. "Maybe we have one or two here ..." he stammered and walked around the store wide-eyed until finally he found a manager who confirmed that, in fact, this sports store does not sell basketballs.

 

Like at so many "athletics" stores these days, a lifestyle was for sale, not basic equipment.

 

On Yonge, I drove from Eglinton north to the end of the retail strip between Lawrence and York Mills. Maybe I missed something, but I could not find one store that sold a football or basketball or baseball glove.

 

I drove back south and dropped my brother-in-law at the Yonge and Eglinton mall. I didn't know of any sports store in there but wanted to be thorough.

 

He found a ball at a toy store.

No shorts

My legs are pasty white, making my leg hair look more coarse and dark than it actually is.

I would need several consecutive days in the sun and a tub of baby oil to darken the skin and bleach the hair. I don't have that kind of time.

I could eliminate part of the problem with a razor, like one of those swim or bike enthusiasts. But I don't particularly need to be more aerodynamic. Plus, as a matter of principle, I will not shave body hair. (It's a moral stand I can easily take because I am not gorilla-hairy. Like, I don't have ear hair, or back hair that you can see from a distance. Yet.)

So I wear jogging pants at the gym.

Even though it's humid (and getting more humid, it seems, each week) and there is only one rotating fan to cool the room containing 20 treadmills, ellipticals and other machines, and I am sweating all out of proportion to how much I exercise, I will not wear shorts.

I am sure I would be more comfortable, could run longer, keep from overheating and getting soaked by the rivers of sweat running down my back and in my eyes, if I cared less.

But being sopping wet and near cardiac arrest is a small price for vanity, right?

Cramped style

The tight economy has hit my gym.

What was once a three-room gym - spacious everywhere, with each machine and bench surrounded by enough room to walk and stretch - has been stuffed into two rooms. The former treadmill area has been bricked off and presumably sold or rented to a new tenant in the strip mall.

I watched over the course of a recent week as the owners or managers - not sure who they were - tried to floor-plan and figure where to fit all the machines.

Their goal appeared to be saving all the equipment if not the comfort. All the machines I use in my workout remain, and for that I am grateful.

But now I can hear the music spill out of other exercisers' earbuds. Smell their sweat. Sometimes feel their breath. When I walk from machine to water fountain, sometimes I bump an elbow or shoulder.

Maybe it will all balance out: If gym membership falls along with discretionary spending, a smaller gym will be big enough.

Viennese sins

I have just returned from Austria with a gut full of goulash and sidewalk-vendor sausages that dwarf Toronto's street meat.

And so it continues: Just as I hit a stride in the gym, something - a vacation or work assignment taking me on the road to cheap hotels and fast food - screws it all up.

I went to Austria to meet my wife, who is on a six-week work stint far outside Vienna.

After a few days in the countryside, we went by train to the historic city.

But can I tell you my favourite painting from the art history musuem's collection of Rembrandt and Rubens? Or describe what it was like to walk through 2,000-year-old ruins in the middle of downtown? Or even explain the excitement of visiting Europe for the first time?

Not really. I was nearly obsessed with the fact that Vienna, while filled with heart-stopping foods and treats, is home to not one morbidly obese or badly out-of-shape person. At least, I didn't see one during my four days walking through several neighbourhoods and riding many trams and subways.

"How is this possible?" I kept thinking while eating a huge sausage crammed into a bun that is open only at one end, where the street vendor squirts almost disgusting yet delicious amounts of ketchup and mustard before squishing in the sausage. Or while stabbing my fork into a multi-layered cake at Cafe Central. Or while consuming one of many bowls of sausage-filled goulash.

I thought maybe the Vienna police hide the unfit during high tourism months. Or maybe it's only the tourists who eat these waist-busters.

It doesn't matter how, though. I am back home and faced with having to go the gym this evening, out of practice and several pounds heavier. And that sucks.

Soft in the middle

I am avoiding exercises that strenghten what fitness dorks call the "core."

I can't explain it well, except that I really don't enjoy the way sit-ups feel. Like going to the dentist or picking up my dog's poop.

Consequently, there's this odd wave thing happening on my upper body. The fatty evidence of my poor diet is sloughing south, slowly but surely rolling toward my waist.

And there it sits, impervious to my workouts.

As I continue to go to the gym fairly regularly, doing chest and arm execises on the resistance machines, my muscles in these areas are becoming a little more defined. And as I continue to run on the treadmill for 30 minutes every other day, a couple upper ribs are even starting to show.

Which makes for an almost comical contrast to the gelatinous gut hanging out right below.

Since the gym isn't working fast enough to get me comfortably within two waist sizes of the 32 I wore before quitting smoking, I recently decided it was time to try a few other things.

I have moved from my usual assortment of fine Czech and other European beers to Coors Light - hoping that light beer will be, as the commercials say, less filling. (My fridge must be malfunctioning because the mountains on the Coors can never seem to get that "Cold Certified" blue.)

I am also trying to cut down on how many light-coloured, pasty things I eat. Hummus, peanut butter, goat cheese on crackers. I mindlessly stuff my mouth with these wonderful foods all evening, and that isn't helping my ponderous middle.

For the first time in years I bought khaki pants from The Gap. Because I can only seem to find jeans that are either too tight, making me look like a past-his-prime regular at the CNE's water pistol or whack-a-mole booths; or too loose, making me look like a 53-year-old named Tom or Bill who likes to tuck in his golf T-shirts. Sometimes you just fall in between blue jean sizes.

My new place in the transportation food chain

I was stopped at a red light - right foot on the curb, back straight, dorky helmet that looks like a plum pit on my head.

From my perch on the old-timey bike, I looked around and could see right into the driver's seat area of the two cars stopped beside me, without the driver seeing me looking.

Both drivers had a mug of coffee within reach, assorted receipts about the console and a gut hanging forlornly over the seatbelt.

Automakers ought to invent a wider "vanity" belt that girdles instead of pinching the fat into something resembling a homemade airbag.

As I do every fair-weather morning, I turned off the road and onto the Lakeshore bike path and headed west toward the office.

Before I started biking to work, I was the driver that hated bicyclists, their undeserved sense of road entitlement, the hypocrisy with which they run a red light at one intersection then at the next hector a driver for turning into their path. I thought they should be relegated to the sidewalk, where they could menace strolling geriatrics instead of fouling up motorists' march to work.

Now that I bike to work, you'd think I would be claiming to see how the other half lives, swearing allegiance to hard-done-by cyclists and ready for war on bully drivers.

Instead, I have merely refocused my road rage down the transportation food chain: Rollerbladers.

I was behind a blader, watching his silly long stride out and back, like he's doing a speed skating warm-up lap at the Olympics. Taking up the whole bike lane. And looking ridiculous.

Before I attempted using the oncoming lane to overtake the blader, I had to look over my shoulder for the speed-bikers - those militant twits with the tight shorts, shoes that clip on the pedal and no mercy for beginners on old-timey bikes. You swerve into the path of one of those and prepare for a sanctimonious earful.

Past the blader, I moved to a part of the bike path that veers away from the road and into a weed-filled neverland near GO train tracks.

Cue the loud timpani drums and ominous chords of the next Law & Order episode. This is exactly the kind of place to happen on a corpse. Right downtown but out of sight. Cars whipping by on the highway overhead.

I half expected to see a detective in trenchcoat leaning over something in the unkempt grass. But on this morning, before it was too late, I got a mouthful of death stench and a few bugs.

Off to the left, a dead skunk, bloated on its back and mouth teeming with flies.

Finally, I got to work.

Something I'll never understand, though: How I can spend 20 minutes pedaling but not especially exerting myself, heading into a lakefront wind that chills to the bone, and still end up soaked with sweat by the time I get to my cubicle.

Sorry folks ...

It has been too long since my last post.

I have been on the road a lot lately hustling for my day job. I am a staff reporter at the Star. The blog is extracurricular.

I was on Vancouver Island for a week, and otherwise driving all over Ontario. I have been chasing leads for a story, living on Tim Hortons and the McDonald's value menu, and staying in crappy motels. One motel, misleadingly called The Grand, doubled as a sort of halfway house for men that have just been released into the probation phase of their sentence and, apparently, enjoy very loud sex. The room cost $225 for the week - which sort of says it all.

I still should have posted.

I guess I didn't think anyone was still reading.

And there wasn't anything new to report.

But then a reader called and told me to check the blog comments. I see y'all have been posting, at first asking where I was, then showing frustration with my complete lack of contact, then assuming I had stopped going to the gym and was too ashamed to say so.

I am still going to the gym. But, as before, it's been the same old yo-yo. 

Small advances followed by annoying setbacks.

I'd go the gym three times a week then hit the road the next week and watch my eyes get puffy with fast food, then return to Toronto to eat Vietnamese and hit the gym every other day, then hit the road again.

When I was in Toronto during the last month, I know I could have, should have posted. But the 8-10 pm time slot I usually use to blog is now taken up by the red hot Blue Jays. I love baseball, and for the first time since 1993 this team is fun to watch again.

I guess there is one thing to report:

I bought a bike - an old-timey roadster. The kind you might associate with Montreal hipsters or a 1950s New Englander with baggy trousers pedaling to the cheese shop.

The effect of which is totally destroyed by the legally required helmet. Some silly, futuristic puff of plastic that looks like the pit of a plum.

Today was my first day biking to work. The bike has only three gears. It wasn't easy. I haven't bicycled since high school, and my crotch paid the price. I limped around the newsroom all day. But now I can say I've added another exercise to my quest for physical respectability.