Why It Matters

Why It Matters

I get into discussions pretty frequently about lifting weights. And it’s funny because when I look in the mirror, I don’t see anything all that special. I don’t see Mark Bell or Donnie Schankle or Lui Xiauxun or Phil Heath or Marshall White. I see a person who is scrappy and oddly shaped. What I see is 16 year old version of myself.

I’m twenty nine and I still feel like I’m leaps and bounds from where I want to be. My students and my friends and people who meet me tell me that I have “good size.” That’s a term that gets tossed around a lot. My students call me “husky.” Apparently, it’s a good term now - but even that…

Even that word, “husky,” zaps me back to when I was thirteen with my mom at KMart doing back to school shopping and being told that Kmart was all she could afford and that if I didn’t like the clothes she bought for me to get a job and buy clothes of my own. I remember angrily tossing a pair of jeans over the top of the dressing room door and my mom yelling back to me, “You’re not a regular fit! I don’t know what to tell you, hun! You’re a thirty two by thirty, husky!”

I found myself pretty upset pretty often when I was thirteen. And now, when I hear the word “husky,” all I can think about is going into school in the 8th grade with a new pair of jeans from KMart on, awkwardly fitting like cardboard, with a forgotten sticker, a stowaway, still running down the side of my right leg:

32x30Husky32x30Husky32x30Husky32x30Husky

Growing up sucked.

But now, apparently, people can “tell that I lift.” And apparently I’m pretty “strong for my size.” And I always find myself in the same conversations. The subjects of these conversations ebb and flow around the following:

How much do you bench/What’s a good bench number?

How deep should you go on a squat?

Should I power clean or full clean?

Why do you front squat?

What are you eating and why?

Is fat bad?

Am I eating enough?

Are you talking about lifting, again?

Is that ALL you do?

But your knees!!???

And the whole time, I can’t help but think of those pants. Those stupid, stupid, uncomfortable pants. And I think to myself - am I qualified to respond to any of this? I’m an English teacher. I never played a Varsity team sport. I never participated in athletics collegiately. I was a distance runner, remember? I was a really, really BAD distance runner. Who am I to speak about any of this….

I try to rationalize anymore. I look at my certifications and think, well, USAW, USATF, Crossfit, it matters, right? Or I think about my coaching credentials that I literally built from nothing… or I think about how I can back squat double my body weight for sets of 10...

But at the end of the day, I don’t care about any of that. Because all I can think about is how much I want to be like all of the guys I mentioned above and how much I want to forget that stupid 32x30HUSKY sticker.

Because, at the end of the day, all that matters really is the squat rack - and being terribly terribly afraid. And I think that’s why I lift, really. I even tried saying it before to people, but it’s never really all that welcomed. What I’ve realized is that all of the answers to the questions I respond to that I listed above ultimately lead to that same very place. The rack. The platform. That’s it. And they ask;

Why?

And I say, “Because.”

Then they say: I just want to, you know, be healthy.

Or they say: I just want to, you know, get in shape. Lose some weight. Blah Blah Blah.

And then I ask, “Why?”

And then they look at me like I’m the lunatic.

Because ultimately, I guess, I am. I am the lunatic. And so is everyone else who does what I do. Think about it. Silly us. We actually think that we can work hard enough to ACTUALLY cause adaptation; despite time and age and injuries and our past. We ACTUALLY think we can CHANGE things. WE ACTUALLY, GENUINELY, POSITIVELY BELIEVE THAT WE CAN AFFECT CHANGE IN OUR LIVES SO MUCH SO THAT IT CAN ALTER THE COURSE OF OUR GENETICS AND OUR MINDSETS AND OUR CURRENT PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE.

And then I take a bite of my carrot.

And then they eat their Gogurt.

And then no one speaks.

*sigh*

I lift because it matters. And it matters because I want to challenge the very fabric of who I am each and every day. The results that come of that are an added bonus. I look the way I do not because of my “Metabolism.” I’ve got plenty of pictures in a drawer somewhere of that kid who used to wear 32X30HUSKY, and I’m sure I’ve got that damn sticker tucked away in a binder somewhere, ridden with the peeled and speckled blue fabric that screams “product of the third world.”

Because who are you, really, if nothing else but the challenges you put yourself up against each and every day? And I know - I get it. Lunacy. We’re all a bunch of God damn maniacs for “caring so much.” It is ALL we do. But what keeps me going back is the same thing that keeps people from starting in the first place. It’s the fear a new kilogram brings to the barbell. It’s soreness the next day. It’s the satisfaction I get each and every time I tell people that I’m looming in on thirty and I feel better now than I ever have and at one hundred and fifty five pounds I can lift more than most guys ever could when they were in their prime.

I lift because I’m a god damn lunatic. And so does everyone else. Because in that place… in that small moment - that brief second where we can taste failure, whether it be a centimeter too high or too low or too short or too far or too forward or too backward - we find solice. We find satisfaction. For that single moment we find cohesion and family and love and honor and respect. And for that single moment we aren’t lost anymore…

And then it ends…

And then we strap back up. And it makes you a psycho.

But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think it’s a bad thing that people don’t know that weightlifting is a sport in the Olympics. And I think it’s pretty bad that when people think of weightlifting they think of bicep curls and shrugs. I think it’s pretty bad that people have completely eliminated fat from their diet, and I think it’s pretty bad that people think soy is a “great option.”

Lifting matters to me because for only a few short hours of each day,  I can finally tell people to piss off WITHOUT having to say anything. It’s my new sticker. It’s my way of explaining that 32X30 was just a rep-scheme I hadn’t tried yet. It was the formula for my re-birth. It was my ID number; and Lifting matters to me because I, at any time, can write a new one.

Stay Husky,

The Poet and The Platform.