Huh.

It turns out that when you suddenly no longer have EXACTLY 42 MINUTES AND NOT A SECOND MORE to squeeze in a plausible workout between work and rehearsals or shows, you’ll lollygag and futz around and get to the gym an hour later than you’d planned and you’ll stretch your (expanded, to be fair) workout to almost two hours. BUT! You’ll have a whole new pile of fresh meat—oops: fresh inspiration. sorry. typo.—preventing you from taking a passable stealthfie.

Also! Not not to brag, but I just jumped up to 80 lb dumbbells on the incline press and the 80 lb barbell on skull crushers (which, if you do them right, do not, in fact, crush your skull). I may be a Peter Procrastinator tonight, but I also feel like a big ol’ Mike Monster.

Turbo Fast Chest Day Because You Took Your Damn Sweet Time Leaving For The Gym is always more badass with the help of Dancing Switchblade Kitty

Pre-Performance Pec Pump and Pic Project!

(And Iowa Public Radio Instant Promotional Raiment!)

Opening night pump! Because these show tunes aren’t gonna flex themselves!

It turns out a poorly timed leg day—desperate vanity dictates that I probably should have cycled into a chest day on opening night—is especially unproductive the day after shredding a bacon-size piece of flesh off my shin. But it’s too late now, and my man-fleshy butt is off to the theater for its official show-tune debut.

And to all of you gym members too dumb to notice that I’ve been taking stealth selfies every time I work out: AT LEAST LOOK UP AND NOTICE MY SHIRT!

The gym tonight is (please select all):

1. Teeming with masculine pulchritude
2. Collectively doing chest, shoulders and triceps because EVERYONE’S USING THE EQUIPMENT I WANT
3. Celebrating the entire discography of Wilson Phillips
4. Rudely ignoring the awesomeness of my Mew Mew Kitty shirt
5. Bringing back the man-bun

When you’re all psyched up for a killer leg workout

but when you warm up at the squat rack you feel the tiniest hint of a twinge of an old tendon injury deep in your awkward buttish region so in the interest of preserving your ability to walk you have to abruptly pick another body part to work out as you bob and choke in a bewildering sea of whatdoIdonowness so you decide to do chest and triceps but you’ve been thinking about destroying your quads all day so your head just isn’t in it but speaking of my head here’s an artistically composed pec-deck portrait of me and my phrenology shirt.

Things that get you beaten up at the gym:

• Rainbows
• Stars
• Pastels
• Failure
• Cutsie-poo shirts
• Saying cutsie-poo
• Stealth selfies
• Calling them stealthfies

In my decapitating-headache haze this morning, I still managed to pack for the gym. Just in case. My mind wasn’t really in the game (as the sportsie-poo dudes say) after work, but a big shaker full of Blue Raspberry C4 Sport Pre-Workout magic re-lit my pilot light quite nicely, and I must say I now have the chest and triceps of a 25-year-old competitive bodybuilder. They’re buried in a shallow grave under the porch, but still.

Speaking of (my workouts, not murder), do you want to know the difference between a pre-50 workout and a post-50 workout? Of course you do: It’s abs. Before I was 50, if I accidentally sneezed I counted it as a week’s worth of abs workouts. Now that I’m 50 (as rumor has it), I have an unhealthy obsession with my waistline and I won’t leave the gym without going all Geneva Convention on my abdominals. Which, coincidentally, makes sneezing extra-super-fun.

But pain is weakness leaving the body. I saw that on a T-shirt once. And it wasn’t pastel.