My gym

I was trying to work out the kinks and pain in my back, but now I feel worse. Maybe I’ll take a bath.

One of the reasons I bought this house was the huge garage/barn in the back. The previous owners had a boat or a camper or something, because they added a huge annex with a high roof on to the two-car garage in back, forming one big jumbo garage. I soundproofed the whole thing, installed some heavy duty fans, and turned it into my gym.

I’ve got a bunch of free weights, a weight bench, a stationary cycle, and a Soloflex which I never use. I bought it before I acquired mid-range super strength 3 years ago, and now it just isn’t a challenge anymore.

I have a large open area for weapons practice and katas which also doubles as a target range for my shuriken gun and the Marauderangs. In the high-roof annex section of the garage I’ve set up bars and rings high above the floor, and I’ve mounted durable punching bags at various heights. I like to crank the techno and jump around like a monkey punching and kicking shit.

The coolest features of the gym are my LMDs (life model decoys). They’re not really lifelike; I just like calling them that. The LMDs are reinforced steel core human-size punching bags with Kevlar skins. They have sensors deep inside that trigger .wav files, so when you hit one of the LMDs hard enough and in the right spot, it rewards you with a little sound clip. I’ve got three of these things: one of them says “You’re the man now, dog” in Sean Connery’s voice when you punch its throat, another screams “Khaaan” like Captain Kirk when you kick it in the nuts hard enough, and the third just farts. Farts are funny.

My back was too tight for anything strenuous, so I just jumped rope for a while and practiced some katas, then said screw it.