After many years I retired from running in 2016 because of nagging knee and other injuries. I replaced those activities by joining a crossfit gym and began working out with weights and cardio equipment. I am active in this and try to get in at least three workouts a week. Working out is very important for my mental health, and I hate to miss it.

Crossfit traditionally involve long workouts which emphasize changing between movements quickly to create a fluid but varied regimen. For example, any one workout may include several weightlifting, flexibility, gymnastic and cardio exercises. The result is that you get a focused workout but the constant varying of movement makes the experience more fun (in my opinion) and engaging. The workouts are by design intense, but good coaching keeps everything within a resonable limit.

In 2020, I and the gym I workout in (along with much of the crossfit community) disassociated with the Crossfit brand over the originator's offensive statements and positions towards the black lives matter movement. We now just go with the term weight training, but the principle approach remains largely the same.

Building a Home Gym

In my Madison home I have build an professional grade gym. I had a custom gym floor manufactured and installed in my house. The room is in the ground floor so there is a 24" concretefloor underneath to handle the stress of the weight. I installed movable speakers connected to a Sonos setup (listening to loud music is the norm). All in all, it is pretty much everything you would find in a professional gym, and I am very happy with result. I still am being programmed by my coach, but I never went back to the gym.

Over the years, Megan and I collected a lot of the equipment (which was hard to find) and built the gym in our sun room. An incomplete list of what we have collected includes:

Here are some pictures of the gym:

State College: Prior to moving to Madison in 2022, I had a gym that I created in my sun room during COVID. One of the challenges during COVID was that (for obvious reasons) all of the gyms shut down. As a result a lot of people were left doing situps and pushups alone in their homes. I did that for a while, then decided to build a full gym in my house. I cut horse stall mats from the local farm supply story to line the floor, which allowed up to work out without damaging the house. That and some in-wall Infinity speakers connected to a Sonos setup (listening to loud music is the norm) in the ceiling and we were ready to go. It was incredibly helpful for me during the many months of quarantine.

Patrick McDaniel - patrickmcdaniel.org