In the beginning...

...there was Usenet and email, and it was good. Before the world wide web, we used those to communicate over the Internet (capital "I"). If more than 100 people would vote for it, you could create a new Usetnet newsgroup. If not, then you had to start up a mailing list and communicate that way (which are still used by bands (especially indie) to let their fans know about new releases). Your mailing list could forward emails that came in automatically to the whole group and/or the emails for a given day could be collected together in one longer email (a "digest") and that would be sent out to list members.

A bit of internet history: I am an internet fitness pioneer. No, really. I started the "weights" mailing list back in 1990. It was the first thing on the whole internet devoted to working out with weights. I put up a web site, WeightsNet.com in 1996 (weights.com was already taken I couldn't get weights.net because, back then, you could only get a .net domain if you were an ISP). It was a fun little project and even made a small amount of money. However, in 1998 I became a father and that took priority over the site, the list, and my weight training workouts. So, gradually, I pulled back from all three.

[Interesting note: one of the people on the mailing list also saw the commercial potential of talking about working out on the net as well as selling related products (I had my own reasons for not pursuing that). I believe he was just a teenager at the time and he really went for it. He spent a lot of $$ to buy bodybuilding.com and worked his butt off. Ryan DeLuca is now a very rich man. How cool is that!]

Fast forward 20 years to today. My children are in their twenties. I have divorced and re-married. I took up triathlons in 2008 but that has been reduced to bicycling. I couldn't take up the weights again because I had my own workout equipment but I didn't have any room for them anymore (the divorce was pretty financially devastating). However, I do now:

That's an olympic bench and bar, a power cage with pull-up bar, a pulldown/rowing machine (using free weights), a curling bar, and a rack for the weights (the dumbbells didn't make it--yet). The bench and big bar I bought around 1988 and most of the rest I bought around 1991. It has all been sitting in a barn for the last 20 years. Things are a bit rusty but so am I.

So why am I writing? Because I am now 58 and working out with weights for the first time in about 20 years. I thought I'd share what that's like. Pretty simple, really.