Well, spring appears to have sprung here in TN. After weeks of weird weather, swinging wildly between snow and warm days, it seems that the warm days are taking over. The great outdoors beckons once again: my son Leo and his close ‘fitness’ friends are shirtless most of the time, and we are all thinking about starting to top up our tans with natural sunlight instead of begging for time on Carlos’s sunbed!
Open air training is good too…
…and suddenly we’re all feeling a bit more like getting back into better shape after a winter of inventing excuses to do that little bit less (on the grounds of our increasing ‘age’!!), or finding ways to show off what has been achieved in the ‘darker’ months…
The warmth of the sun on your chest…
Our favourite running attire becomes the ‘norm’…
(Just look at those ‘traps’!!)
…and the opportunities to show off what you’ve achieved also drives to more efforts inside the gym…
Our so-called ‘wild swimming’ suddenly seems less irrational to others…
Good news for the youngsters, too (Leo/Chris/Ryan)… because they won’t get over to Wales for a while, their UK ‘confederate’ Ollie, who was over here at Christmas, is getting to come over again at Easter – not with his parents this time (my oldest friends) but with another family from Oxford UK whose son Alex is now one of Ollie’s closest gymnastic mates there and well deserving – Ollie says to us on Skype – of working out with the US side of the ‘gang’. So they’re all ‘over the moon’ – we get to host Ollie throughout the trip, and Alex for a while when Alex’s parents go off and do their own touring thing for a few days. Alex is 12, and Ollie shortly will be – all of the US side are 13 and they’re all crazy about weights, acrobatics and being outdoors with their shirts off! Sounds like it is going to be huge fun, and we all owe a great debt to my friend Colin back in Oxford for allowing Ollie to come and organising his ‘chaperones’. The Skype call between Ollie and Leo/Chris went wild when they found out… no way 4000 miles is ever going to break up this little gang of fitness freaks!
Obviously they all take after their parents, whose adventures are documented here:
e-books are available as well as the printed versions… includes our discovery of gay love as well as the sporting stuff and the misadventures we encountered on a couple of circus tours…
So, naturally, we are keeping fingers crossed for great weather from now on, especially at Easter. A wrestle in the woods? Sure – we’re all up for that, not just the kids…
Try out some outdoor acrobatics? (sadly, we don’t have sea within hundreds of miles)…
…or just hang out in the great outdoors?
Yeah, bring on that great spring/summer weather – the best bit here is before June after which it gets very humid, and everyone gets covered in rivulets of sweat…
…and that’s when we shall all start wishing we were in Wales. Just when our circus engagements get under way!
But it’s got to be preferable to this, however ‘macho’ doing something like this makes you feel…!
Yeah! Memories of winter…
