My hands hurt.

My house has a big yard.  It's got a bunch of trees.  We've got 2 avocado trees, 2 huge mango trees, 8 citrus trees, 1 tamarind tree and something called a chirimoia.  There are also 4 big trees which flower and one small lavender tree.  There used to be more.  Along the west side of the yard, there are 3 large stumps and one smaller one.  Along the back of the house (North) there are 3 more medium sized stumps and the east side has a huge pile of wood.

I'm not a big fan of the stumps.  Nataly and I have been paying a gardener to help bring grass back to our yard, and the stumps aren't a great deal of fun to mow around.  Not to mention they're pretty ugly. So Friday I set about removing a few.  By hand.  With a pickax.

In total I spent something like 5 hours whacking away at 3 different stumps.  One big one which yielded up enough good wood that I'll be cooking some chicken or hamburgers with it.  A smaller one which I believe was once a citrus tree and a new one I created when I cut down a very ill peach tree that we had in back.

I was actually able to extract the root balls of both the peach and the probable citrus trees, but the big one I whacked at until I got it below the ground and then buried it under a mixture of compost, sand and wood chips.

Needless to say, the repeated shock to my hands, arms, and back has me sore even two days later.  And my fingers are particularly stiff.  Why do it then?  Well, like I said: the stumps are ugly and a pain to mow around, but also because of the reading I've been doing about the Paleo diet.

Now, I'm never going to adopt the "Paleo diet".  As a friend of mine on Facebook said:  I tend to stay away from anything with the label diet.  But that said, there's a whole bunch of lifestyle information in these articles too.  Hunter Gatherer lifestyle stuff.  A hunter gatherer was an all around athlete by necessity.  "Cross training" was part of their weekly ritual.

I've never been one to mix up my athletic endeavors;  when I raced bikes, I rode my bike; when I did Kung Fu, I did Kung Fu; when I run; I run.  But here there's all this stuff around the house that is challenging physically, and it's got to get done.  So instead of having the gardener do it, when I get back from the North East, I'll continue my war against the stumps.  That should develop some good core strength.  I've already noticed that just raking leaves is a fair workout and my lawnmower?  It doesn't require gasoline or electricty...

Running wise:  I've logged 7 hours and 49 miles since Monday.  I let the 5 hours of ax swinging count for 30 minutes of running and I will be heading out for 2 hours plus today once Deneb is down for his nap.  Right now it's raining, so I'm hoping it'll stay cool.  It seems that every run this week has been brutally hot, sunny, and windy.  The rain is a welcome change.

Thanks for reading and it seems exercise doesn't have to be a formal undertaking...
J