AUBURN - On the crunch machine at the Finger Lakes Health & Fitness Center on West Genesee Street, Joseph Wilcynski begins with 30 pounds before adjusting it to 70. This is after he had just finished reps on the pull down machine and overhead press and had a walk on the treadmill.

Not bad for a man who turned 90 May 21.

“It's the same (routine) every day,” Wilcynski said. “That man behind the desk (Terry Clifford) sees me every day.”

Six days a week, every Monday through Saturday - rain, snow, sleet or shine - Wilcynski can be found from 11 a.m. to noon at the fitness center doing his workout. (On his day off, he keeps himself busy cutting the grass and bushes or maybe doing some painting, he said.) For the last year, Wilcynski has exercised in this way to work himself back to optimal health after a bout with pneumonia that lasted two months.

Companion Joan Gallup said one day she came home to find Wilcynski on the floor and had him rushed to the hospital. That was Jan. 31, 2005. He came home two months later and began rebuilding through at-home therapy.

“I worked with him and would do it with him,” Gallup said, tearing up over the thought that he might not have made it. “But he did it on his own and never complained. He doesn't sit around, even when he was sick he always wanted to be doing something.”

Wilcynski joked that Gallup was a bit too overprotective because at first, Gallup said she was a little nervous about his strength and letting him get too active.

“Don't do this, don't do that,” Wilcynski imitated Gallup sarcastically. But Gallup said eventually she realized she couldn't hold him back.

“She's quite a gal,” he said.

The physical therapy then moved out of the house, and later he continued the process at his own freewill at the Finger Lakes Health & Fitness Center.

“I just love to exercise,” Wilcynski said. “It's like a drug addiction.”

When he was younger, racquetball, tennis and handball were favorites of his, while nothing really compared to his love of golf, which he said he played religiously at Dutch Hollow Country Club for 40-some years.

“I played every damn day of the week. Me and Joe Daloia ... snow, rain, it didn't matter. You name it, we were there,” said Wilcynski while remembering looking for the ball in the snow.

He'd still be playing golf right now had it not been for the pneumonia, he said. He gradually hopes to work himself back out onto the course.

When he first started going to the gym, Wilcynski said he could barely lift the weights up or last a full hour, as compared to the progress he's made over the past year, including teaching himself how to use all the machines. He said he plans to continue his regimen until, “Who the hell knows, the end of time,” he said laughing.

Looking at the shape he's in, the end of time might not be for quite some time. Wilcynski stays this way by not only exercising daily, but eating well.

“Every day he comes home from the gym and asks ‘Where's the salmon,'” Gallup said. He eats this healthy fish daily.

He eats well and lives well by doing everything in moderation, and that, according to him, is the secret to longevity. His mother died just two weeks short of turning 100. It is she who he models his life after.

“She was really a handsome woman,” he said. “(When she passed), she was in very good shape, and her brains were all there.”

So he keeps going every day because “he just wants to do it.” When he's not at the gym, he and Gallup like to walk together or sit in the park in Skaneateles. He normally goes to bed each night around 1 a.m. and wakes around 6 or 7 a.m., with only a short five-minute nap sometimes during the day. He doesn't miss a beat.

He's been this way since “way back when; I can't even imagine the day it started.”

Staff writer Laura Boyce can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 236 or at laura.boyce@lee.net