Confessions of a Horseshoer

Exercise

106 Exercise After the operation on my arm, and a short period of physical therapy, I was briefly forced into a fitness center for what the doctor said was a “more thorough recovery.” I had never been able to see the value of a fitness center , maybe because I’ve always been in pretty good shape, thanks to my dad who had me doing 100 pushups a day and other exercises from the third grade on. My boyhood room was a huge unfinished attic and at one end he had made a gym for me. The floor was bare boards that didn’t even reach the walls.There was a gap of about three inches where the floor tried to meet the wall, and if you ever dropped a toy down there, it was gone forever, into the bowels of the earth, I thought. Behind the darkened chimney in the corner was where the monsters lived. One did not even look in that direction come bedtime. The gym had weights, a wrestling mat,a huge body bag for punching,and a thick rope that rose to the unfinished rafters above the mat, crossed the entire room, and dropped down on the upper bunk where I slept in a tiny civilized section of the room.The bedroom part had a tiny rug, a tiny desk and chair, and my bunk bed. I was supposed to climb up the rope at the far end of the room, climb hand over hand to my upper bunk, and lower myself to bed • Exercise • 107 at night. In the morning, I was to reverse the process, climb up from my bed,cross hand over hand to the other end,lower myself to the mat, go downstairs, eat breakfast, and go off to school, a splendid physical specimen of a third grader. I didn’t mind doing this too much because Daddy had me convinced there was some huge, albeit intangible reward for all of my efforts. I, however, altered the routine when I discovered that in the morning I could jump for the horizontal part of the rope instead of climbing up to it. I started doing this because the rope hurt my hands in the morning.One morning I jumped for the rope from my top bunk, missed, and fell flat on my face onto the floor. My dad heard the crash and ran up to see what had happened. He picked me up, carried me downstairs, and told me I didn’t have to do that anymore. I loved him for that, and determined to stick with it from then on. I wasn’t going to be no sissy. In high school I was able to profit from the rope-climbing exercise when I set the school record for the rope climb. (Later in college I came within a fraction of a second of setting the U.S. college record for the 20-foot rope climb that at the time was a part of gymnastics.) When the high school track coach noticed that I had broken the school record, he knew he had the perfect man for the pole vault. He spent an entire afternoon with me, ignoring the rest of the track team, discussing the dynamics of pole vaulting, showing me movies of the sport, etc., etc. I never believed any of it. I would watch the movie where the pole vaulter was running with his pole toward the jump,and at each step I would say to myself,“He’ll never make it.”It looked physically impossible.I so convinced myself it couldn’t be done that I was never able to vault more 108 • Confessions of a Horseshoer • than a foot or two. I could jump higher than I could pole vault.The mind is a wonderful and frightening thing. Back to my bedroom gymnasium. I boxed the bag, climbed the rope, lifted the weights, did my pushups, and boxed with my dad. Fighting with my dad was a real frustration . He boxed on his knees, but the gloves were so big I couldn’t get past them to him.All I remember was a big mass of boxing gloves, his and mine, in my own face. He never really hit me, but I never got a good shot at him either. It was so frustrating that I usually ended up in tears. I would really have liked...