Bury the MOAB.

And excavate the rock pit.

MOAB = the mutha of all boulders.

In the previous episode of the workshop story I seem to remember that I started with blowing the bloody doors off and I know that I finished that stage by phoning the skip hire people to come and collect the first 6 yard skip load of clay and stones which I had slowly hacked out and carried to the skip, a bucketload at a time. There is now a score card of ticks on the workshop wall which records that in April I removed over 240 bucket loads of clay soil and I didn’t record the extra buckets that were mostly granite and are set aside for other folk to use as hardcore hardcore – Granite is super dense and super heavy. At one point I was getting about one bucket of stones to every four or five buckets of clay but then I hit a patch that came as one for one. Right at the end of that stage I hit the MOAB which took me several days to deal with : a Granite boulder big enough that I couldn’t heave it out and ended up digging a hole underneath it so as to bury it.

Iv’e tried several times, to write a post about re establishing an exercise program after having experienced a series of admittedly quite minor strokes : minor in that they weren’t devastating strokes but each one did some damage with the result that I am globally weak, my balance is poor and iv’e had days when I feel tired and groggy much of the day.

You might realize that i’m kicking myself a bit as I don’t have anything like an exercise program carried out in the gym but in terms of physical work that resembles exercise then i’m ‘exercising’ very hard indeed. Today for example – my second hired skip arrived and I did 6 or 7 rounds of work during which I started with a few minutes of energetically swinging a maul at the heavy clay and then a ‘set’ of ‘reps’ of carrying a bucket load to the skip. Each ’round’ maybe takes 20-25 minutes after which I go take a break and have a drink – being warm and dry it’s thirsty work. Each bucket only comes out at around 25-30 pounds and only gets carried about 30 feet (I haven’t measured anything exactly) but today I repeated my work ’round’ 6 or 7 times and only then went for my official exercise walk around the lanes here.

…..And yes, i’m very tired this morning so maybe i’ll treat myself to a slack weekend.

When I was a regular gym user, 3 or 4 times a week every week, I thought that I was training relatively hard (in comparison to others) but I did always have days off between sessions. I was also in the habit of changing my exercises around to have ‘leg’ days, back days, arms/shoulders days etc etc although to balance that idea/mistake I tried to make as many of my exercises ‘big and compound’ by which I mean hitting as many muscle groups as possible.

Whatever I was doing, right or wrong, was working for me especially from the time on that I focused on training with free weights rather than ‘machine’ weights where the basic moves are made easier by the inherent stability of the exercise machines. Given that I was already in my 50’s I managed to put on some muscle mass and I definitely lost a load of fat/body weight so I came out both leaner, stronger and ‘fit’. In brief, training with free weights worked well for me and if anything I regret having to give it up.

For those of you that understand exercise you will know that there are 3 or 4 principal approaches to training but even they mainly use weights in some way or ‘cardio’ in some way – some of them, Crossfit for example, use both. I definitely can’t run and I don’t feel that I have the core stability to squat and deadlift. In terms of my work as exercise, swinging a heavy mattock for a few minutes each round feels very ‘cardio’ although the mucking out phase is only a matter of lifting a 25-30 pound bucket each ‘rep’ and carrying that to the skip….in short it feels more like work than exercise : a day of that certainly feels tiring but not exactly like pressing weights in the gym.

My problem, such as it is, is that iv’e already dug out half the volume of the workshop floor and this week I started more digging, carrying and filling of the second skip. I’ll most likely be done with this whole stage by the end of May and in a way that’s great news as I estimated that it would take much longer. After that i’m not sure what I need to do next as i’m not exactly a builder – I know that I will need to barrow in and backfill the floor but I should have that done within a couple of weeks as well. After that the whole project is taken over by the actual builder and even he is going to have to bring in a crew of fit blokes to shift the mixed concrete from a mixer lorry parked in our shared drive to floor space/void that iv’e dug out.

This morning the job seemed to be ‘trolling’ me in that every time I took a hard swing with the mattock it as often bounced straight off a granite rock and, multiple strikes later. I was quite blown out by the effort ; after just 10 bucket loads I came in for a longer rest than usual and maybe a bit of an internet surf to exercise my mental muscles instead.

Workshop project blog, end of May 2025.

It’s the end of May and if I could personify what the workshop floor excavation is doing to me then it’s trolling me mercilessly. Where most of the progress so far has been pretty slow but steady, as long as I keep chipping away at the job, at the end of the excavation stage it has turned into an endless pit of interlaced granite blocks where the ratio of clay to stone has gone to about one for one ; for every bucket load that I dig out and then carry out at least half is granite rocks…..heavy too.

Below…this is where I stopped to take a few days off – tantalisingly close to having the excavation stage done and yet every time I come to it there’s still a few hundred kilos of clay and rock to deal with. If I sound a bit dispirited it’s enormously hard and heavy going.