The spandex is stashed somewhere in the garage. The markets are crawling across the TV screen. The crush of autograph-seeking pro wrestling fans is a few months off.

Paul Ellering, 62, will slip back into a flashy jacket with "Enter Chaos" written on the front — and he'll assume the persona — once again appearing as "Precious" Paul Ellering, pro wrestler, Road Warriors manager, WWE Hall-of-Famer, at WrestleMania this spring in Dallas.

But here in the Historic Rock Tavern, closed Wednesdays in winter, he works out in solitude. Three or four days a week in the carpeted dining room of the place he and his wife, Joan, own on Big Birch Lake, he runs through a nonstop, 60-minute routine of step-ups, curls and other exercises that keep his heart rate at 150.

On this Wednesday morning in late January, he'd already finished his workout. He answered the door wearing a royal blue South Dakota State University sweatshirt, black sweatpants, white socks and a pair of slippers.

He'd been up since the markets opened at 3 a.m.

"Precious" referred to precious metals and Ellering's interest in stocks. As the Road Warriors manager, he always wore a sharp suit and carried a copy of the Wall Street Journal. When he entered pro wrestling in 1977 (his first match was on Christmas Day in Minneapolis), he kept his own name because the previous year, as a South Dakota State University student, he'd set a world record in the 220-pound weight class dead-lifting 746.25 pounds.

Framed, 8x10 photographs shot outside a gym in the '70s show off his well-defined upper body. They hang in a paneled hall leading downstairs, overshadowed by the trophy elk his father bagged in Idaho.

The St. Cloud Times reports that the dining room and bar once displayed memorabilia from Ellering's pro wrestling days, but those items tended to go missing. Today, posters from the Iditarod (he competed three times in the 1,000-mile-long Alaskan sled dog race, and maintains a kennel of Alaskan huskies) are subtler reminders of a colorful career that started at Melrose High School, circled the globe (with frequent stops in Japan) and then returned to the Melrose area, a place known more for agriculture than pro wrestling.

He's not a big surprise in Melrose, where he and Joan, a project planner for a Twin Cities-based medical supply company, grew up and graduated in 1971.

His three kids attended Melrose High School. (Becca, 26, teaches special education in the Albany district; Rachael, 23, is on the Prairie Wrestling Alliance circuit based in Alberta, Canada; Saul, 21, recently earned a health and fitness degree from Alexandria Technical & Community College.) He moved back to Melrose in 1988. After his last full-time year in the business in 2000, Ellering had time to more closely follow Melrose High School sports.

Not even delivery drivers were surprised when they first saw Ellering at the Historic Rock Tavern. He and the father of the Bernick's driver grew up together on Big Birch Lake.

On this morning, only a few ice anglers broke up the snow-covered expanse. Ellering offered coffee, and then set his mug on the end of a long table overlooking the lake. He reflected on the circumstances that converged to thrust the Road Warriors into the national spotlight, and the state of pro wrestling today.

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