Health and fitness update: How cars reflect ourselves.

Drove the hot-rod Newport to physical therapy today, on request of my therapist, self-diagnosed gearhead. I gave it a little rev or two in the lot right outside his window, and he loved it! When I left, he lifted his blinds to watch me drive away. Driving that machine always makes me smile. Speaking of which, here's a photo from the Newport's (and my) first car show, Rev It Up! here in Lawrence, KS, a few weeks ago:


Look at that: Shorts! Ah, Kansas weather, you are a fickle sonofagun.

Therapist Rob continued to work on the tendon stiffness in my elbow and gave me stretches to deal with growing abdominal/rib soreness - turns out it's just more tendon issues. I'm supposed to do backward and side stretches on the big ball after workouts on the punching bag or anything else that really works the abs.

He also gave me a rule of thumb for rest after a workout that causes muscle soreness: Wait 36 hours before repeating the exercise to allow the muscles to heal up and get stronger; that soreness is actually little tears in the muscle, and the body deposits new proteins to heal them, which makes 'em stronger. One can do light workouts or work other muscle groups the next day, but give a break to the sore muscles.

Oh, and to my question, "Why do I keep encountering this kind of tendon issue?" he said, "How old are you?" I told him, and he smiled. "Guys like us who choose to stay active at our age just have to deal with discomfort like this."

Hmph.

He went on: "You make the choice to live with tendon and muscle soreness or get diabetes and heart disease. I'd rather have the occasional ache than let my body fall apart and die young."

Word.

Which reminds me: I meant to take new fitness-tracking photos over the weekend, but alas. Next weekend.

Something just came to me: Perhaps one of the (subconscious?) reasons I get such pleasure from hot-rodding the Newport is that I transformed a not-so-special late-'60s vehicle into something much more powerful and spry than it ever was before... much as I'm doing my best to transform this late-'60s Middle American into the fittest I've ever been, too, to hell with age. Both of us can get a little creaky, but we can still show the younger whippersnappers a thing or two. Hm. Something to ponder.

Hope you're doing well. Now I'm back to the (never-ending) grading. Who assigns them all this stuff that I have to grade? Oh, right.

Chris