cesimpson

Ever since I learned of Ed Zercher and his Zercher Lift, I’ve thought it was a wonderfully functional lift - incredibly useful in ‘real life’. This weekend proved its usefulness out for me.

Friday

Friday after work got together with about a dozen families from the neighborhood. Younger kids rode their bikes around. Older kids played catch. Adults drank a few beers and ate whatever snacks people brought. Mostly chips ‘n’ salsa type stuff. Someone made these little snack crackers with some kind of soft cheese and salmon on them.

More than the food and drink, we finally got to see everyone who went into hibernation several months ago. Fun.

Also, while I was at the party, my phone rang. It was a really good friend of mine, delivering some fantastic news (read to the end to see the fantastic part). It’s not really my story to tell. I include it here only because fantastic news for him is fantastic news for me. I’m glad everthing worked out. I’d been concerned all last week, and it was good to hear news of such a quick resolution. Congratulations!

Sunday

Sunday was plant the vegetable garden day. I spent most of the morning trying to fill up the damn tires of the tiller. They went flat over the winter and I was having a time trying to get the tires to seal on the rim. I tried every trick I know. Got a rope and cinched down the tire, put oil on the bead, twisted and pushed on and squeezed the tire…just wouldn’t seal. Finally, I gave up and took it to the local Dobbs. It took the guy about 5 minutes to fill both tires and he didn’t charge me a dime. Thanks Dobbs man. You’re the best. Seriously.

This brings me to the title of this post. I estimate that tiller weighs 150#. In fact, one moment please…

…wow. Close. I just went to Amazon.com and found a similar model. Shipping weight is listed at 153#.

Anyway, I had to put this thing into and take it out of the bed of father-in-law’s pickup about a half-dozen times this weekend. It’s big, fairly awkward, no good place to grab, and, well, about 150#. I messed around with various techniques and the one that worked best (one might say, “the one that worked at all”) was to hook my left arm under machine, between the wheels and the blades, and wrap my right arm around the motor. From there, it is a combo Zercher Squat/Zercher Good Morning to hoist that beast up to tailgate-height. After about the 3rd time I had to do that, made me thankful for time in the gym.

Tires filled, I turned my efforts to tilling the ground. Took me about an hour to till a roughly 5m x 6m plot. Took me another hour or so to plant 8 tomato plants, a dozen pepper plants, some cabbage, broccoli, zucchini, eggplant and two cucumber plants.

After that, I took a shower, lit the grill and opened a bottle of beer.

Neighbors came over and we all had grilled chicken and asparagus and a very nice spinach salad with walnuts and blue cheese. It was a fantastic dinner and a fantastic finish to a pretty good weekend.

Workout

2k Rowing Erg test

7:57

This is my first. The longest I’ve ever rowed before was 500m. 2k was quite the test. Not really knowing what to expect, I just tried to keep my 500m splits at or below 2:00. On average, I was successful.

I’ll be honest, around 1k I wanted to quit. That third 500m was absolutely the toughest. By 1200m my quads were pretty overwhelmed with burning. Around 1400m I thought I was going to puke. Once I got to 1500m, it was easier to visualize finishing. Just 500m left. Just 400m…250m…etc.

My goal was less than 8:00. I achieved that. I’m not sure how much faster I could go. Maybe a little bit. Not much. Might want to work in that realm for a while.

Anyway, not fun.

Box Squats w/ 12″ box

10x @ 135#

10x @ 185#

6x @ 225#

3×5 @ 245#

By this time I didn’t really feel like being there anymore. I never really recovered from the 2k and my legs were dead. The incline bench was open and I haven’t done incline bench, literally, since sometime in high school. What the heck.

Incline Bench

10x @ 115#

2×10 @ 135#

3×5 @ 155#

0x @ 185#

So, that 185# was a bit ambitious. ~shrug~