Swinging Cannonballs

Think of an iron cannonball with a curved handle welded to it. Think of a row of pairs of them in increasingly bigger sizes from about ten pounds to way over fifty pounds each. They are called “kettle bells” and they are old-fashioned weight training devices that are said to have started in Russia.

For seventeen years I would end half my sweaty workouts at The Old Texas Barbell Company by holding a kettlebell in each hand as I bent my knees and thrust forward with my butt, swinging the kettlebells up and back, to repeat ten times before going to a heavier pair of the cannonballs with handles.

I wrapped up my other workouts by pumping the long anchor-sized ropes up and down for sixty seconds, making waves up and down the long rope, rest a minute, then pump the ropes again, for three or four times.

In between it was the traditional barbells and dumbbells, curls and presses, and such. Nothing fancy.

Who but a guy named Mike would own The Old Texas Barbell Company, a  gym with no air-conditioning, no music, no treadmills, and certainly no TV’s. 

Last month, on Mike’s 72nd birthday he shut’r down. He sold the place, complete to the pressed tin roof, bare brick walls and plywood floor. He sold the building back to the BBQ joint next door, having bought it from them back in 1996 when he moved from booming bustling Austin to little lazy Lockhart.

The Old Texas Barbell Company was also a fitness museum. The laminated covers of dozens of old fitness magazine decorated the walls, along with old rowing machines. Odd shaped dumbbells and a couple of anvils were on display.  Most of the free weights came from the old Gregory Gym on the University of Texas campus, where the weight room was under the stage until the place was renovated. Dull burnt orange paint still clings to some of the bigger round weights.

Two huge painted canvas clothes illustrated an early strong man, and Carol Finsrud, Mike’s wonderful wife, who is a world-class senior pentathlon athlete. Wooden display cases housed Carol’s ever growing collection of gold and silver medals, and shelves held Mike’s body building trophies from his younger days.

The paper that tells of Milo, the Greek wrestler,  is my favorite piece on display.  In ancient Greece, Milo the young boy asked his teacher how to grow stronger than the other wrestlers. He was told to select a new-born bull calf, throw it over his shoulders and carry it once around the arena every day for a year. Seems to have worked.

I don’t do change really well, and I was stressed out that Mike’s gym would soon not be there for me to scratch my two-or-three times a week weight-lifting itch.  I’m no gym rat, in fact I’m a bit of a fat rat who cherishes his recliner. But for nearly two decades,  Mike’s has been part of my lifestyle, the place I traded gossip with other retirees and some youngsters, and the place where I went to exert some effort that made me sore in a good way.

After all, Mike’s gym was the place where one Saturday morning a phone call came wanting to know who was the lady in town who made the fancy decorated birthday cakes. Two people knew, but they named two different bakers. I’ve never figured out why that cake call came to Mike’s gym, except that Lockhart is a little town, where roots run deep, and people sometimes do things differently.

In the end, my depression about leaving the austerity of the Old Texas Barbell Company for the new modern 24-hour Snap Fitness facility was easily solved.  As Mike closed his gym, he built his own personal workout building in his backyard, and he invited some of his longtime clients to continue working out there.  He moved about half his collection of iron weights and kettlebells, even the ropes making the shift.  I bike to Mike's backyard gym two or three times a week now and see some of the same folks I’ve grown used to over the years, and I still sweat.

The new added extra is gigging Mike about the bathroom in the new gym having a marble countertop around the sink. I expect his wife Carol had a hand in that.

Where’s the connection between Mike’s gym and McBride’s Civil War novels? Besides, the cannonball shaped kettlebells, I dunno if there is one. The gym is one place where writing ideas percolate as I work through my list of exercises, but then, so is my bed, after my full bladder awakens me in the predawn hours.

I actually think I wanted to write about The Old Texas Barbell Company because it was an old-fashioned, no shortcuts, no frills, sort of place, run by a gruff, but welcoming guy, and I view me and my novels that way.