This Animal is Dangerous?

If, like me, you’ve been exercising a long time, then you probably have relics from your early days of training.

My earliest artifact may become of interest to archaeologists a few hundred years from now.  It’s a training belt that I designed myself. 

Back when I was seriously training for high school football – and I was very serious about it – I did squats with pretty heavy weights.  In fact, the heaviest free weight lift I ever did was a 435 pound squat, or about 200 kgs, when I was 17.

Serious lifters wore these belts to protect their lower backs when lifting heavy weights – and as a sign that they were serious lifters. I can’t remember where I bought the belt, but I think I bought the gold plate at a shop in Bermuda during  a family vacation. The dragons I had printed on the belt may have been inspired by the epic novel Shogun, or maybe I just thought dragons were cool, like any sensible high school boy.

The plate says “This Animal is Dangerous, Please do Not feed or Disturb”.  I’m not sure if I thought I was really a dangerous animal, but I'm sure my desires ran in that direction. I've had this belt for 46 years now, and I still think its cool, although I gave up doing squats long ago.