Back when I was in high school and in
early college, I was one of those workout guys. I don’t think I could qualify
as a gym rat but I actually enjoyed working out. With a large handful of years
passing, that inevitable idleness that comes with marriage and things pulling
you in multiple directions, working out just dropped out of the schedule.
Now, some of the guys that are with
us, they still have that gumption and energy that comes with youth. So without
an official weight room to work out in, they boys cooked up a variety of things
to help keep them in shape. They cordoned off the northeast corner of the store
where the semis used to make their deliveries. A gallon of water weighs 8.34
pounds and the one thing we have plenty of is gallon jugs. Be it from the milk,
orange juice, tea, distilled water, drinking water… We got a lot of gallon
containers floating around.
Curling a 8 pound weight may not seem
like a lot but as Lance tells me all the time, for strength, you want low
weight with high reps. If you want size, you do heavy weight with low reps.
None of us are planning to be in a bodybuilding competition. Lean and strong is
a good way to be in the zombie apocalypse. So I see a number of the ladies
working out with water jugs, using the handles to make the curls easier.
Like any grocery store, we also have a
large number of milk crates. Milk crates hold four gallons of liquid so you are
easily looking at 34 pounds of weight for you to curl and the milk crates have
multiple handholds so you can curl them one handed or two handed. We do have
the 5 gallon water cooler jugs for those that do want more weight.
So we have more than enough things
that can help us work out. They boys took some of the industrial mop handles
and taped two together using a whole roll of duct tape to make a bench press
bar. They took two 5-lb bags of sugar and wrapped them up in a giant ball of
shrink wrap to form a medicine ball. There is that four foot section of toys on
the cereal aisle. Who would have thought kids jump ropes would end up being
used to help us stay in shape during the zombie apocalypse. But, well, there you
go.
It is a lot of workouts where you use
your own body weight so it is things like push-ups, sit ups, weighted dips… and
lots and lots of cardio. I don’t want to equate us with mall walkers but if you
do a circuit around the store, you have a pretty good lap pattern going. Then
if you dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge down different aisles, especially
making last second decisions, it does take on the form of an obstacle course.
I think has far as improvisations go,
we have done alright. I guess you could say that about a lot of the things we
have done in here, be it the air mattresses for sleeping, the vinyl table
cloths as shower curtains to the extension cords and dust mop handles to make
zombie man-catchers, we have improvised fairly well.
Just writing about this, I am
inspired. Gonna go curl some water jugs.
