By David Trinko
The Lima News
My family and I were lifting weights together the other night.
Well, except for the one we dropped on my right foot.
We recently invested in one of those exercise equipment racks, with cables pulling the weights in various directions and angles to work different muscle groups. There are people in our house who want to get in shape, despite my repeated exhortation that round is a shape.
A funny thing happens when you buy one of those pieces of exercise equipment that you have to put together yourself. You’re getting it because you know you’re not as strong as you ought to be. Yet somehow you’re supposed to manhandle the pieces of the torture rack until they’re in the right order. It’s doubly fun if you decide to put it in the basement.
With this particular model, we exercised all right, exercising our minds to try to understand the diagrams of how to put more than 100 pieces in the right places, without the trouble of using actual words or sentences in the directions.
Despite our frustrations, we successfully reached the step where we needed to move the 25-pound weights from a box onto a pair of poles on the machine. We had a smart system going, with my wife pulling them out of the box, one of my daughters relaying them to me, then I lifted them up and over onto the protruding bars.
All was well for about 150 pounds of these handoffs before one incredibly painful fumble. The weight dropped, right onto the three toes in the middle of my right foot.
I want to make this part clear: I do not blame my daughter. I know she blames herself. She shouldn’t. Accidents happen. You shouldn’t feel guilty if you did nothing wrong, and she did nothing wrong.
However, facing an immense amount of physical pain and not wanting to inflict a lifetime of emotional pain, I determined I needed to get out of there in a hurry before I said or did anything that might make her question her father’s love for her.
I can only imagine what I looked like, hopping around on one foot and heading up the stairs. I envision it looking like Yosemite Sam when he’s firing his guns off into the air, except he’d never land on the right side.
To make a long story short, my toes are quite purple, and I walk with a bit of a limp for now. It will heal, and some day we’ll all laugh about it. At least I can walk, and I have a decent excuse for not using our now-completed weight set.
Some people say lifting weights is a pain in the neck. I think it’s a pain in the foot.
It’s further proof that my family and exercise equipment don’t belong in the same sentence, let alone the same room. Years ago, we were throwing out a free-weight bench I’d had in my 20s. The only lifting I was doing at that point was when I moved that bench or the weights out of the way to get something else.
In moving it one time, a weight fell off the bench and hit my wife, of all places, in the toes. That spelled its demise.
Still, she learned to forgive the weights, and one day I shall too. I’ll have to wait for my heart and my toes to heal first.
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See past columns by David Trinko at LimaOhio.com/tag/trinko.
David Trinko is editor of The Lima News. Reach him at 567-242-0467, by email at [email protected] or on Twitter @Lima_Trinko.
