How Much Ya Bench?

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Remember that SNL skit, How Much Ya Bench? Anyway, my brother in law Rob gave me his old bench and weights, and I put them up in my office last year and started working out regularly. I don't want to get like those muscle-heads you see walking around, but I do want to get my blood pumping for at least a half hour every day.

You'd be surprised at how many personal trainers and gym rats have a problem with that. When I lived in Bayside, my dad bought me a gym membership as a present, and the personal trainer assigned to me wanted me to eat Power Bars and take all sorts of odd supplements. I got tired of the "Get HUGE!" culture and never went back after a few months.

In the city, I was a member at Asphalt Green, which I think is one of the greatest facilities in Manhattan. I loved it there, except the trainer there was always trying to get me to join his powerlifting team. At one point, he took me aside and said, "Tom, some of us are just big, and we're meant to lift heavy things. You're never going to be one of these skinny guys who run. You're meant to lift heavy things."

So, yeah, I have a history of dealing with trainers who want to ignore my own fitness goals and substitute their own. Really, I have only a few reasons for wanting to work out regularly. I'd like to make sure my heart is strong, since I've had an irregular heartbeat in my past, and I want to make sure my ticker doesn't wear out prematurely. I also just want to get the recommended daily amount of exercise. After all, I leave my house at 6 AM, come to New York and sit at a desk for most of the day. I get home at 8:30 or 9 PM and I haven't exercised all day. It's easy to see that's a recipe for disaster. So I head upstairs to my office for a half hour and get the blood pumping.

Over the weekend, Rob's bench was on its last legs. The things holding the bar and weights up were held together with JB Weld. If I let that go, one day the weights would come crashing down on my neck.

Another problem was that the weights were those old, thick things that you could order out of the Sears Catalog, which meant you could only get so much weight on the bar before you'd run out of room. Not good.

I also broke the bench doing leg extensions the other week. Basically, it was time for something new. So I headed down to Sports Authority and picked up a Gold's Gym bench and cage set on sale. I also got a weight set to replace the Sears catalog weights.

If you think an Ikea bookcase is no fun to put together, don't buy one of these things. It took me two hours to put together. I'm glad I got it though. My chest and legs have been sore for a few days - I guess that means I'm doing it right.

Post-Super Bowl Reactions

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Eli Manning is a MAN. He eats lightning and craps thunder. Talk about stepping up... Any athlete that can do what he did in the face of the press and fans ragging him the way they did is just tremendous in my book. I haven't really watched football all season. The game against the Packers was the first one I saw, and then the Super Bowl. To be truthful, I'm not a big NFL fan, but I will hang out and watch games if invited to someone's house. I'll even make food. To me, it's more about getting together than it is about being a fan of any particular team. If the Giants had lost last night, it's not like I would have been as crushing as, say, the Yankees losing the World Series. I was just happy to see a great, competitive game with some terrific strategic moves and great plays. I don't know how David Tyree managed that catch after Eli nearly got sacked. That Eli stayed up, and that the ball somehow magically stuck to Tyree's helmet long enough for him to get two hands on it, is nothing short of a miracle.

As we all know, though, there's so much more to the Super Bowl than the game.

As an advertising writer, I want to say a couple things about the commercials. They sucked. This year was the first year I remember commercials truly being unremarkable. The best one might have been the Coke commercial with the Charlie Brown, Stewie and Underdog balloons. And I still wondered what the point was after it was over. The Bud Light commercials featuring super powers were just dumb. Audi's take on the Godfather horse head scene was dumb. GoDaddy driving people to the web, where everybody has instant access to free porn, in order to see a racy commercial featuring Danica Patrick was dumb. Just about the only commercial that was intriguing to me was the Hyundai Genesis commercial. And that's just because of my own morbid curiosity about whether or not Korean engineers have solved the challenge of how to keep a 300+ HP car made of tin from exploding on contact.

The halftime show wasn't going to give Lewis Black any more fodder for comedy routines. I'm a Tom Petty fan, and I found that halftime show to be simply boring. No surprises, just the four abbreviated tunes that everyone expected. I figured they could have at least had Tom joined on stage by someone interesting. But I guess "interesting" isn't what the producers are going for in the post-Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction age.

Nostalgic & Reaffirming Lunch

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I just had lunch with Sean Bohan, a fellow K2 alumnus, social media rock star and all-around great guy. We spent a lot of time catching up and going over who is doing what post-K2. The best part of the lunch, though, was hearing about all the successes Sean has had getting GM and other big companies on board with social media and Conversational Marketing. I'm glad to see that he's done well with this and that such top-tier clients are relying on his advice. I know he's fought the good fight to keep clients on the straight and narrow. For me, just hanging out and talking about this was very therapeutic, because it affirmed for me that big companies are capable of engaging in conversation online in a sincere way. Sean's moving up to Boston in a few days. I'm hoping that once he gets settled up there, I can hang out with him when I'm visiting Boston-area clients.