Jim Owczarski

jowczarski@enquirer.com

NEW BERLIN, Wis. — The first two warm-up shots went through, nothing but net. Like old times. Emmett Cleary passed me another ball.

“That’s right, you said you played in high school?”

“Before the knee surgeries,” I said as I lifted for another shot, feeling good.

At that precise moment, my chest and upper back said, ‘nope, you are not allowed to do this,’ and I promptly fired a line drive right into the face of a guy standing below the net.

Cleary, a former Cincinnati Bengals and current New York Giants offensive lineman, gave me that silent “Oh, something smells bad” look.

Yup. At least it only took me an hour to embarrass myself.

I had just completed a workout led by Bengals right guard Kevin Zeitler, along with his former teammates Cleary and Dan France (now with Cleveland), at The Princeton Club, a gym in suburban Milwaukee, and it didn’t take long for me to feel it.

This was in mid-March. I had only decided to start exercising again in late February you know, to “get ready.”

So after watching them go through a two-hour workout before this one, in which they moved entire racks of weight – 300 pounds – for nearly every exercise – I was like yeah, I’m not ready for this. At all.

It was disarming, though. I was so small compared to them – which caught some glances (the ‘who is that little guy?’ glance, and the ‘he must be super strong so let me watch him – oh, he’s not strong’ glance) – but it really didn’t matter if I did 100 pounds or 220 pounds on anything. So any kind of “I’m working out with NFL players” intimidation factor went away pretty quickly. The soreness didn’t. That lasted about 36 hours in my chest and back.

Exactly a month later, I said, let’s do this again.



Wait, what? Yeah, you know, get the full effect. (Wait, what?)

In Zeitler’s last offseason workout before returning to the Bengals, he took me back to The Princeton Club and ran me through one hour and 45 minutes of a total upper body work. Every muscle group, beginning with 13 minutes of planks.

(He likes to use the word “massacre” when it comes to this type of thing, by the way. He’s not wrong. I had a hard time taking the coffee cup out of its holder in the car the next day. My upper back is currently telling me not to reach for anything heavier than maybe 16 ounces off an elevated surface.)

Regular people don’t do what Zeitler does. I can say I finished the workouts, twice. Separated by four weeks. That’s something(?)

And while I can’t say I felt true physical pain during these sessions (that came in the days after), I was exhausted. I wanted to stop, many times over. I wanted to putz around between sets – to which Zeitler would sternly remind me to get back into rotation. He didn’t mess around. This was meant to be fast, and difficult.

My brain searched back to maybe my high school cross country days to think of when I felt that spent, looking for any reason to keep going. My hands were on my knees within 40 minutes. I would ask him what the next exercise was, secretly hoping for “… and that’s it.”

“And that’s it” didn’t happen for a long time.

It was a bit competitive in that I felt I had to get through it – if only for a measure of self-respect. I mean, I’m not George Plimpton. It’s just exercise, right? But it wasn’t. As Zeitler threw up multiple sets of increasing weight on the chest press, he asked: “How can you push around a defensive lineman if you can’t do 288?”

Exactly.