Brian’s fitness journal after a brain stroke
This morning, I hit what I can only describe as a personal triumph, the kind that makes you feel smugly satisfied in the best possible way. I completed two full sets of 10 pull-ups, back-to-back, with only a few seconds of rest between sets. For most people, that might sound modest. For me, it’s a mountain crossed.
Let me give you some context. A few years back, my wife, a thoughtful woman that she is, bought me a pull-up tower. She purchased it about a year before I had a brain stroke. The machine sat in the corner for quite a while after that, patiently gathering dust while I did the rather unglamorous work of recovering. When a stroke takes you out of commission for three to four months in bed, your muscles don’t exactly hold a farewell party. They just leave. Quietly. Without notice.
But the tower waited. And eventually, I came back to it.
After hitting my 10-kilometer running goal, I decided resistance training needed to be part of the picture too. I rebuilt the pull-up tower, dusted off a set of weights I bought about fifteen years ago (they’ve aged better than I have), and my wife kindly agreed to get us a “Stealth,” a planking platform that doubles as a gaming platform. Yes, you read that right: you plank while playing a game on-screen. It’s either the best invention of the modern age or a sign that we’ve all lost the plot. Possibly both. Either way, my core is not complaining.
Consistency, as it turns out, is the real workout. In the early days, I was constantly juggling training sessions, appointments, and house chores. My wife handled nearly all the housework until 2020, when I gradually started taking over. These days, she handles lighter tasks while I tackle the most physically demanding one: mowing our very steep hill. If you’ve never mowed a steep hill, allow me to inform you that it is its own cardio program, and it does not care about your schedule.
For a while, the hill was winning. Fitting in full-body workouts and lawn mowing during summer without something slipping off the schedule was a puzzle, and it was always the resistance training that got dropped. Then, a few years ago, I cracked the code: spread the workout menu throughout the week so no single day feels overwhelming. Simple idea. Took me a while to get there.
And today, the plan paid off. Two full sets of ten. Clean. Done.
My run, on the other hand, had a bit less glory. I finished 45 seconds behind my target pace, which means that skipping my Saturday 10K did not, as I had perhaps secretly hoped, gift my legs with mysterious renewed speed. Wednesday looks promising: warm enough to head out immediately after waking up, though rain may have other ideas. The weather and I have a complicated relationship.
Still, today belonged to the pull-up bar. And I’m taking it.
Keep moving, one rep at a time.