Old School Gym Rat

I’m an old school Gym Rat. I’ve been working out for over twenty-five years, gained and lost two hundred pounds of muscle, remember when aminos were the hot new supplement, seen the low-fat/high-carb, low-carb/high-protein wheel revolve around at least twice, gone from the single set to failure mindset to high rep/low weight and on to the heavy and hard and the “less is more” (more or less) attitude. I have eaten so much chicken in my life that my face is on the Most Wanted board at the poultry post office.

I am not a true bodybuilder; I like my biscuits and beer a bit too much to live the perpetual diet of a true devotee. I eat, and drink, and then feel guilty about it. I try to keep height-to-weight and strength-to-weight proportionate, i.e., strong enough to pick up the heavy end of things when moving furniture, and big enough that it is assumed that that is the end that I will get. I have reconciled myself to the likelihood that I may never again see that last row of abs, but still enjoy being used as the example when my friend’s wives ask, “Why can’t you stay in shape like him?”

My personal theory is that you make a decision at some point in your adult life that you have already been as good as you are going to get; that you give yourself permission to get old. Some do it at thirty, most do it (consciously or unconsciously) at forty, a few hang in there for the long haul. Some give it up for ten years and come back, and a few have a medical wake-up call or personal epiphany, but the hard-core gym rats are in it for life.

Bodybuilding has to be the most misunderstood avocation that there is. There is a pantheon of athletes that are touched by the hand of God, genetically ideal for their chosen sport or endeavor; Wilma Rudolph, Mickey Mantle, Arnold, Tiger Woods. How many of the millions of golfers in the world can realistically aspire to be as good as Tiger?

The uninitiated think that we are all trying to be Arnold, with a back wide enough to show a movie on and arms bigger than their legs. They knowingly comment that bodybuilders are not as strong as power lifters, to which I reply, ”Yes, power lifters are five times stronger than you, and bodybuilders are four times stronger than you.” The concept that you just want to be fit and strong is too realistic of a goal for them because it is attainable; they cannot be Arnold, so they don’t have to try.

Most of us Lifers still read the magazines, keep up with the sport, and secretly think that it peaked with Frank Zane or the Schwarzenator. It is difficult to relate to the current round of behemoths with the frog’s leg thighs and veins like a roadmap of Connecticut. As a rule, about number twelve in the contest looks better to me than number one. I can appreciate the discipline that it takes to be that shredded, and size is always impressive, but long-timers like myself tend to think that symmetry and proportion have become the “redheaded step-children” of the sport; part of the family but relegated to a lesser level of importance.

I have always traveled in my work, which is related to heavy construction and environmental remediation. Since no one with money wants a paper mill or power plant in their back yard, and money stays close to the city, this for years meant country motels and roadside diners. Gyms were few and far between in the smaller towns, often a one-room affair with a bench, lat pull, a homemade squat rack of dubious engineering design and materials, and the ubiquitous Universal Machine. Wherever Mr. Universal now resides, he should be living in gracious splendor. He must have sold one of these contraptions to every YMCA, high school gym, and upwardly mobile motel owner with delusions of grandeur in 1970’s America. Many of us who started on the Universal got an unpleasant reality check when we discovered the difference in doing 300lb. on the Universal bench station and on the free-weight bench. Still, the worst gym on the road beat evenings riding the wild barstool with my fellow workers, so I stayed at it.

I also developed some innovative motel room workouts, featuring elevated-leg push-ups and dips between kitchenette chairs, squats done water skier style, with a towel wedged in the closed bathroom door, and pull-ups on any object that looked like it might bear my weight. I still have the set of 25 lb. dumbbells and ab-roller wheel I took on longer jobs. Almost any town now has a facility of some sort within driving distance now, but there is still no shame in pushups and running some motel stair sets. The muscle doesn’t care where the pump comes from, and the pump is what it’s all about.

Twenty years ago, traveling also meant that the only green vegetable readily accessible at dinner was usually salad, often pale and starting to wilt, with toppings limited to what was cheap and convenient; diced, fatty ham, grated cheese of a color not found in nature, and a dollop of hydrolyzed fat, sugar, and food coloring for dressing. I was once in a buffet in L.A. (Lower Alabama) where there were five meats on the spread; four fried and a one-inch thick pork sausage with white flecks of fat as big as a pencil eraser. The specialty of the house was fried green tomatoes, and the green beans were cooked with lard and sugar. The healthiest thing on the menu was coffee. Needless to say, I mastered simple hot-plate cuisine on a single burner, this being before the days of microwaves in motel rooms, and a good deli in a local grocery was a godsend. Nowadays, most restaurants have at least one option that masquerades as low fat, and a few side veggie choices. Can you say Spam Lite?

I was single from age thirty to fifty, and so the gym/fitness center became one of the best ways to meet women. I was never any good at meeting women in a bar; the music is usually prohibitively loud for small talk, there are too many smokers, and finding common ground is sometimes difficult or even treacherous. These are the women who end their ads in the Personals section of the paper with the phrase “No Game Players!!!” Good people do sometimes make bad choices, and there are always some real diamonds out there among the zircons glittering in the clubs, but had most of these women managed to somehow get their shit together, they would never have been able to lift it.

The gym was a much better venue for meeting women; less noisy, a built-in subject of conversation in common, and you get a look at them in spandex. Said spandex can also be somewhat misleading, due to what I call the “opening a can of biscuits” syndrome, but enough said on that subject. Suffice to say that, romantically speaking, gyms have been very good to me.

This leads us into the ticklish subject of looking at women in the gym. Men are going to look at women. This is a fact of life. The trick is how to enjoy the view without offending the scenery or injuring yourself. Two cases in point come to mind:

I was doing incline dumbbell presses with steel, octagonal head 75 lb. dumbbells, with the bench set up in front of the mirror. Just as I had them in position and had begun my set, a fit, sweaty young woman in spandex leotards and one of those anal-floss thongs came into the room with a twenty-pound straight bar and began to do “Good-Mornings” in front of my bench, at about thirty degrees starboard. (for the unenlightened; Good-Mornings are done by putting a bar across your shoulders and, legs about shoulder width apart, bending over at the waist while keeping the legs straight. The effect on the glutes is very interesting, visually speaking.)

This would have been a good time to practice a bit of self-restraint and keep my attention on my lifting form instead of the one in front of me, but, while I had the option, I did not have the ability. I leaned my head subtly to the right to get a more straightforward point of view, so to speak.

One of the few things in this world upon which you can depend is that gravity works in a straight line, and maintains the principal of verticality, regardless of the object in that line. In this case, my right temple. While bringing the weight down I managed to hit myself in the head with it.

While not of Olympian proportions, 75 lb. is a significant amount of steel to bounce off of your forehead. The angular edge of the octagonal head added a little extra zing to the impact. I managed to retain control of the weights, pretended that three was my usual number of reps for a set, and set them down. I gave a little “whew” of fake exhaustion, wiped some mythical sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand, and subtly glanced down to check for blood. The next day I had a goose egg on my brow, and a great self-deprecating story to tell to the married guys at work. I wish I could say I also learned a lesson, but keep reading.

On another weight room evening, leg night, I was doing squats at a squat rack when, out of the corner of my eye, I spied a gym regular, a petite brunette with a dazzling smile and a serious rack that she had not possessed three weeks earlier. I tried to track her in the mirror as I re-racked (no pun intended) the weights. Understandably distracted, I managed to pinch the tip of my right index finger between the rack (I just love typing that!) and the bar. It took about four seconds for a blood blister to form.

Cursing softly, I went over to the water fountain to run cold water over the wounded digit. It had drawn up to an angry, dark red, puffy lump on the tip of the finger, destined to remind me of my carelessness every time I needed to write, take things out of my pocket, or pick my nose. I was so absorbed in the contemplation of the finger that I turned from the water fountain while examining it and poked it into the left member of the impressive new augmentations that had caused the injury in the first place.

There is no graceful way of explaining why you have just run your finger into the breast of a minor acquaintance. I blushed mightily, stuttered an unintelligible apology and retreated to the comparative safety of the men”s steam room, technically innocent, but karmic-ly chastened, nonetheless.

I would like to be able to say that my motivation in beginning to lift weights was improved health and vigor, but in plain truth I just wanted to have muscles. That is more complicated than it sounds; I did not just want the appearance of strength, I also wanted to be strong. And as I got stronger, I wanted to be stronger still.

We all pretend that it is all about the ladies. A truism of the sexes is that, by and large, men grow muscle to impress or intimidate other men, and women dress to impress or intimidate other women. Years in the dating trenches eventually brought me to the opinion that, beyond a certain level of acceptability relative to total package appearance, the great majority of women are not that impressed by muscles.

Whatever the reason you started lifting, the act itself becomes the motivation. This is one potent addiction. Whatever the distractions and complications in my life, let me miss two workouts, and that little voice behind my eyes starts to nag, begins whispering about losing hard-earned muscle, about reconciliation equaling surrender; it feels like cheating on your wife (or how I imagine cheating on my wife would feel. Love you, sweetie!).

There is also the camaraderie and ambiance of a serious gym. In the mid-eighties I used to work out in a facility in South Florida with the daunting name of “Hardcore Bodybuilder’s Gym”. This was not a spa, nor a fitness center. Very few machines, tons of free weight, indoor-outdoor carpet and rubber mats on the floor, bargain basement paneling and mirrors on the wall. A faint smell of sweat and steroids. Large, serious men, and a few women, diverse in race and culture, but united in purpose. Somewhere between a club and a cult, except no one recruited you and no one but yourself made you come back. However you felt coming in, once you got there you could not help but give it your best; to do less was a betrayal.

Now in my fifties, the initiative waxes and wanes, but it is a rare week that does not find me in the gym two or three days a week. I do a simple upper body / lower body split, try to hit the abs and lower back a bit each workout, and cardio when I can muster up the energy. I live in a small enough city that faces become familiar, I’ve belonged to five or six different establishments over the years, and I knew this guy from the “Y”, this girl from the Gold’s. We nod and smile, acknowledge the acquaintance and common addiction. We are none of us as good as we could be, but better than we would have been had we not been bitten by the iron bug. Part Zen, part habit, by some measure a manifestation of fantasy and wishful thinking, a large time investment and requiring more and more effort as the years fly by, and still we come back. And I guess that says it all.