Art Starts

I spent a lot of time with the plastic weight sets in my basement after attempting to play football in 9th grade @ 5'10" and 102 lbs. (At 50, I'm now 6'0" and about 230). This continued through high school even though I didn't play football (too busy working and saving money for college).

It wasn't until about a year or so after getting married that my wife and I decided to join a gym that was just opening up in town. I think we actually entered a drawing for a new car at the mall and instead got a free tour of a gym under construction. This was in the early 70's and of course based on my years of plastic weight work, I was easily impressed with all the chromed weights and machines and the mirrored/carpeted walls.

I was also impressed with the spa room which had a steam room, sauna, inhalation room, whirlpool, lap pool, and a rock covered wall with 100's of cool fine mist shower heads.... I really had no idea what I was doing but there were a couple of "big" guys there who I watched talked with and learned from.

Like someone else commented, the ladies had the gym on Tuesday, Thursday ,and Sunday and the guys had it the rest of the time. So on Saturday's I would often go into work very early and then hit the gym afterwards. We stayed with this gym (mostly being used by me) until we started having children and then it was back to the basement with the plastic weights again for me.

Then when I started to work in Milwaukee (about a 45 minute commute each way) I was finding it more and more difficult to keep up my home workouts. So I ran into a co-worker who was spending his lunch hours racing down to the Eagles Club who had a weightroom much like the ones seen in Rocky movies - dark, damp, stinky, overhead pipes, old, crusty cranky attendants, etc. etc.

It was also located in a rather run down area of the city but about 1/2 of the police department belonged to the club so we actually felt pretty safe. We used to say that if you dropped anything on the locker room floor there just leave it due to contamination! It was at first a little intimidating but eventually we got others to go with us and soon we about 1/2 dozen of us flying back and forth for our "Olympic lunch" as we called it...

Eventually we begged, pleaded, etc. and now we have a great fully equipped weightroom right here at our Corporate offices and life is good.. This is a little more than just my first day in the gym so I'm sorry for rambling on a bit but it was fun for me to look back at this......

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