As an illustration, I should tell you about the Hammer of Sore.
I had a nice, 12-pound sledgehammer I used for years — splitting the wood, pounding in stakes, the odd discipline task (did I mention I’m a Lacrosse coach?) One day, last year, I was splitting some wood, and I missed the wedge, as I often do, and split the worthless wooden handle.
Flash forward to two weeks ago, when I decided to put a retaining wall around the newly-level area my children’s playset now occupies. My retaining walls are always the same – railroad ties (ne, landscape timbers) stacked on top of one another brick-style, drilled down, and secured with rebar that is SLIGHTLY larger than my predrilled holes. The work involved in getting that often-bent rebar down through several layers of railroad ties is, without a doubt, worthy of railroad songs.
When I set about the task of getting all the stuff together for this retaining wall, I realized I needed a new sledge. So I popped into my local hardware store, and actually had picked out a good replacement for my 12-pounder, when I saw it: The Hammer. It was bigger. It was shinier. It was heavier. It was 16 pounds of sexy rebar-pounding lovin’ with a big, yellow, shatter-resistant fibreglass handle. Mmmm. LOVE.
Now, posessing the hammer — simply owning it — is one thing. Picking it up, and feeling how heavy it was is a second thing. But using it to pound in dozens of lengths of rebar… that’s something else. It made my computer-keyboard-riding physique a tad sore. Come Monday, I hurt in places I didn’t even know I had muscles. But I got the job done, and isn’t that what such a manly hammer should help one do?
OK, yeah, I also moved a dumptruck load of dirt from one side of the property to the other (which means moving two dumptruck loads… one into the yard tractor trailer, and one back out into the new garden bed), so that might be part of it. And lest ye think I’m doing it all alone, my wife, who is a lot scrappier than she looks, moved at least half of that dirt, and even as we speak is moving a dumptruck load of mulch around the property, despite her pain.
As for me, this past weekend, it was a fence around the garden, for which I used another instrument of geek-body torture, the Post Hole Digger. So, for the second week in a row, I am in profound pain.
But not so much that I couldn’t outrun the little boogers at Lacrosse practice last night. And on the upside, I have a tan now… and the nice thing about muscle pain is that it means one has muscles. Hmm. I wonder if I should publish a fitness book — the Weekend Warrior’s Guide to Fitness through Extreme Yard Work.
Now, if only I had time to write it.
