BC Lions quarterback Mike Reilly missed the final two games of last season with a fractured wrist. But the 35-year-old told TSN’s Farhan Lalji the wrist felt good and his workouts were on track until the gyms closed down due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“As the New Year turned, that’s when I started to get back into working out and testing my wrist out,” Reilly said. “Everything was great, 100 per cent coming along. I always chart my workouts and my weights that I’m lifting and things like that and I was on par with every other off-season and then a few weeks ago the gyms shut down and we can no longer utilize that.”

Reilly said since then it’s been challenging to keep up with the strength portions of his workouts and he’s had to get creative in his preparations for the new season.

“It’s been a lot of distance running, which I hate believe it or not,” Reilly continued.

“But the strength phase of preparation has been very challenging. Not everybody, myself included, has home weight rooms with bench press and squat racks and things like that so we had to be creative and try to run a lot. We have a bunch of hills here (in the Seattle area) so I try to utilize those things too.”

Reilly lives in Queen Anne, a suburb of the city of Seattle, which was the original epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Reilly and his family have been dealing with the pandemic for a while now but said he can see people starting to handle the situation better.

“It’s been life altering for everyone in the entire world of course but we started dealing with this a little bit earlier than everyone else (in the United States) did, so it’s been interesting to see how things have progressed. At first there was a lot of panic … but I think that at least here in the Seattle area, we’ve been going through it for a fairly long time compared to everybody else, people are taking it in stride. The grocery stores don’t seem to be too crazy. It seems people are not buying in excess anymore and understanding that they can go to the grocery store once a week.

Reilly had always planned on using this off-season to rebuild his house, so he was always going to spend a lot of time at home this winter.

“I guess you could call it good timing because this off-season was going to be strictly dedicated to working out and finishing (our) house.”

“I was going to be on house arrest working on this place regardless so that’s been a nice little thing for us to work on.”

Reilly finished by saying he felt the Lions made a lot of progress this off-season and will be ready to go when the season starts.

“It’s been a very strange off-season but it felt like things were moving in the right direction for our team with the acquisitions during free agency, bolstering offensive line and wide receiving crew … it seems like all of that gets ground to a halt as the world stops turning.”

“Nobody’s doing any type of work right now but I’m still getting emails from (Lions offensive coordinator) Jordan Maksymic … he’s still going after it hard, sending me ideas through email and try to figure out ways that we can utilize this time to continue to improve our team. And we’re going to keep going as if camp is going to start in May and if things change then we’ll adjust accordingly.”