OUR LATEST WORKOUT ROUTINE :

           SYNCHRONIZED  SHOVELING

                        On Thursday I was out with the neighbors engaging in the latest workout program to sweep the Philadelphia region.  It's called digging out, and everybody's doing it.
                        To understand the significance of this, you have to understand that Philadelphia is not a workout town.  We go to the gym sporadically.  We jog only occasionally. We do calisthenics reluctantly, but we still manage to look good.
                        Oh, sure, some obscure magazine once decided we were America's fattest city, and perhaps it was justified.  We are, after all, kinda fat.  Maybe it's the cheesesteaks and hoagies, or the soft pretzels and tastykakes. Maybe it's the constant sitting.  I don't know.  But I do know that Philadelphia has proved over the years that fat is the new skinny.  Rotund is the new buff.  And digging out of snowstorms is LA Fitness, Philly style.
                        At first I didn't believe it.  I thought that maybe I was imagining things.  But on Thursday, when I joined my neighbors in digging out for the umpteenth time this winter, I realized something.  When we're digging, we're in this thing together.  And most of all, we're getting in shape.  Just like all those spray-tanned people at the gym.
                        Unlike the LA Fitness crowd, our workouts are pure grit.  We aren't shallow enough to let fancy Nautilus machines twist our bodies into soft pretzels.  We don't do stair climersunless we're on actual stairs.  We don't dress up in million-dollar workout gear when dollar-store chic will do.
                        Real Philadelphians work out the old-fashioned way.  We throw on our dirty sweats, lace up our paint-stained boots and use worn-out shovels to dig our way into shape.  It helps that snow plows routinely push 100 pounds of extra snow in front of each house, thus trapping our cars in icy graves that force us to dig them out using nothing but old shovels and elbow grease.
                        Counting back to the snowstorm that led to the rescheduling of the Eagles-Vikings game, I think I've shoveled through about 1,000 pounds of snow in the last month or so.  My arms are rock-hard.  My legs are solid steel.  My chest looks like a barrel.  My secret?  I spend two hours lifting hundreds of pounds of snow while wearing a Rocky Balboa hoodie and a wool hat that would look ridiculous were it not for the subfreezing temperatures.  Then I go into my house and eat the closest thing to a cheesesteak I can find.
                       My muscles are thankful for the snow routine, but my joints are not amused.  Like many men in their 40s, my brain is writing checks that my cartilage can't cash.  Fortunately, I have my neighbors to egg me on, and while we talk sports and politics and neighborhood scuttlebutt, we are also forcing ourfellow men to dig at least as long as the other guy.  In Philadelphia snow-shoveling circles, this is what's known as spotting.
                      Of course it's not the same kind of spotting that people do in the gym.  Those phonies just stand there half-holding the bar and pretending they'll save the guy on the bench if he can'tlift that 300 pounds again.  In the snow-shoveling workout, spotting is real, and it consists of watching to see if the other guy gets tired before you do.  If he does, you spot him and give him the stare.  It's not quite the, "Why can't you do 80 inverted situps? stare from LA Fitness.  It's a phily stare --- one that says, "Man up, dude.  I'm 10 years older than youand my shoulders are on fire.   The least you can do is pretend you're not hurting, too."
                      That's how we do it here in Philly, where shoveling is a sacred bond.  Inour world men with shovels have got each other's backs.  We'd better, because our backs are gonna get us pretty soon.