It was oh, back in the summer around 2009. I'm not much of a yard sale guy but a friend of mine, Tim Laporte, father of the athletic twin's Nick and Will Laporte, was having a yard sale and selling off a bunch of weight training equipment including a bench press.
It was a good deal and I always wanted to get one.
Sadly, due to a bad case of procrastination, the bench never really ended up leaving the shed for years.
That is until the spring of 2020.
The first lockdown left us with very little to do with everything closed and all workout gyms forced to shut their doors.
The demand in the spring of 2020 for any form of weight equipment was nuts. Online stores could not keep up with the demand of those online orders while prices of weights on the local online marketplace and dollar auctions in the area went through the roof too.
I have been into using weights off and on since my late teens and many of those barbells, dumbbells along with plates travelled with me from Lethbridge, Alberta (via Dawson Creek) when I made the move to North Bay back in the spring of 1996.
Now, with an 18-year-old daughter who is a hard-working swimmer who is on the Laurentian Voyageurs swim team, along with a 14-year-old rep hockey player and a wife who was getting back into weight training; the bench press is in high demand.
As we all tried to adjust to the new normal, weight training became a prime activity in the garage at our home on the north end of the city of North Bay.
Kudos to our talented neighbour Shawn Gutzeit, who renovated our garage about six years ago to make the carport a gym/hockey shooting gallery.
But as my daughter went to school, my son started training regularly at the YMCA with Logan Baker, the Dawson weight training centre usage had once again dropped. Yes, that procrastination without anyone else around to weight train, meant workouts were becoming few and far between again.
Well with my daughter home from school, the YMCA shut down for my son, that gym is once again becoming a prime workout location. Yes, and I'm evern working out more too!
