An old-school workout

COEUR d'ALENE - As we flip the calendar to May, I always enjoy hearing comments and questions from neighbors as I begin my spring workouts:

"What the hell is that?"

"Don't you have any real equipment?"

"Are you a communist or something?"

Yeah, it's lawn-mowing time again.

But hold the gasoline and exhaust fumes... mowing the lawn can really be exercise. You just need a reel lawnmower. That's reel with two "e's," as in the old-fashioned lawnmower on a stick with a spinning circle of blades between two wheels. It doesn't use gas or oil, just people-power, so even though it sucks to mow the lawn, at least you get a great workout.

I still remember buying my first reel mower, shortly after my wife, Cathy, and I bought our first house in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (think the Silver Valley, just with bigger lakes, smaller mountains and more humidity). I went to the small-town hardware store, asked if they had a reel mower, and the Helpful Hardware Man joked, "Wow, you must really hate somebody to make them use that." (Yeah, oil companies, I should have replied.)

Anyway, for the past 16 years I have harvested the benefits of using a reel mower instead of gas-powered machines. Many of those benefits are environmental and economic in nature (the price at the pump has only increased since 1998), but we'll focus on the cardiovascular workout and muscle building here.

Pushing a reel mower through grass is a lot like blocking someone on the football field. It's a leg-based workout that, if done right, requires you to lower your base, move your feet and extend your arms into your opponent - in this case, a lawn that keeps growing. Unlike football, holding is allowed, and you don't have to fire out of a four-point stance (hey, my team ran the option. There was no pass protection).

I realize this is roughly the same posture used to operate a gasoline lawnmower, but most of those have some sort of propulsion mechanism to drive it along. Or at the very least, the fossil fuels make the cutting blade spin.

With a reel mower, your energy and muscles make the blades spin! Pushing forward gets the blade carriage turning, and when those blades pinch grass against the contraption's metal strike plate, viola: your lawn is keeping up appearances.

You also need to mow your yard more often with a push mower, because tall, thick and/or wet grass will not cut very well. In our little corner of Coeur d'Alene, on the Rathdrum Prairie, I have found it necessary to mow at least once a week during the cooler and damper months of May and June.

So when you combine the driving leg motion of the reel mower with the squats required to rid the yard of dog poop and dandelions beforehand, mowing day is a great lower body workout!

Now, you might be asking, how well does it cut the grass? To be honest, not so great. If you have ruts in your yard, a reel mower will bounce right over them. If you have oddly-twisted twigs or woodchips scattered on your lawn, they'll jam the turning blades, stop the mower in its tracks and punch you in the gut with the handlebars (it's part of my "core" workout).

And of course, here in North Idaho, the wiry strands of grass seed heads resist cutting, so you have to go back and either yank them out by hand or chop them down with lawn clippers. Forget the weed-whacker; this is known as more exercise!

Face it, if having a green, perfectly trimmed lawn is a priority, you aren't considering a reel mower anyway. So until my wife lets me pour rocks on the yard or install Astroturf, I'll keep cranking away with the reel mower. Instead of spending hundreds of dollars on gas, I've burned thousands of calories each summer and made a small dent toward reducing global warming.

Joel Donofrio is a copy editor at the Coeur d'Alene Press who loves to discuss out-of-date technology and the veer option offense. Email him at jdonofrio@cdapress.com.