Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided - that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 - but by iron and blood.Bismarck was an interesting fellow, to be sure. His ideas about governance, welfare, and even education are still to this day keeping an eye on modernity like a gargoyle in a cathedral.
But that’s a topic for another day. In this post, I want to write about something I’ve always dabbled with then dropped under varying circumstances: weightlifting. Literal blood and iron.
Back in ought-one (2001, you pikers) I lost my job when the so-called ‘dot com’ bubble burst and stayed unemployed for a while. I decided, fat bastard that I was, to join a gym while I worked as a consultant on the side. Right about then, my wife’s friend had a boyfriend who was the Strength and Conditioning trainer for the FAU sports teams. Keith was a powerlifter and trained me in a state-of-the-art gym at the school. The (painful) salad days, as I like to call it.
He was brutal, and I loved every minute of every iota of pain inflicted. I pushed, pulled, spun, turned, and manhandled an immense amount of cold steel. Well the steel actually wasn’t cold, but it always sounds better for steel to be cold. Moving on. I got to be in reasonably good shape until the bastard had the bad form to get married and move away to Pennsylvania.
I tried to carry on as best I could, but the welcoming, soft, swinging underarms of pain-free laziness beckoned and I wish I could say I had the fortitude to resist, but as anyone who knows me can attest, I can resist anything but temptation. And so it was up the pounds ladder I once again climbed with not a little difficulty.
That was a while and several pounds ago until I became a papa and the shit just got real. I believe the imperative to lose fat, gain muscle, live longer just sort of combines with the recent ‘upping’ of life’s stakes, don’t you? What’s more, I hear it told that bouncing grandchildren on one’s knees are great, especially the part at the end when the
So it’s once more unto the breach dear friends, once more. This time it’s personal. And stuff.
So it is has come to pass that for the last 2 months, I’ve been speaking the language of (cold) steel, moving iron from here to there. Strange new words now cross my lips like front squats, step ups, cable wood chops and epiglottal grunts aplenty, accompanied by clenched teeth and sore muscles.
Apart from the downsides to visiting the gym, it’s been great getting back (don’t tell my muscles, they ache. Terribly.) Even 3000 miles and years between my Florida and Idaho gyms, the same dead-eyed dipshits look at me past droopy eyelids and the blondebots are still spending forever training their “NO” muscles, as Phung calls them:
The old guys who’ve been given the news by their physicians: either start now or start never shuffle in and half-heartedly poke at dumbbells and elliptical machines. The wrinkly bones (or is it bony wrinkles) of middle-aged try-hard women who could afford to let themselves go a bit and still no one would give a shit, spend every wasting moment prying open the steadily closing grip of The Destructor and failing. Make hay, bitches.
And then the upper body behemoths who hate lower-body exercises as much as they did elementary Geometry. These heavy browed cousins of Paranthropus boisei waste time on hack squats and fucking Smith Machines, while the empty and solitary squat rack looks at them, shaking its head.
They’re all there and for three hours a week, I wouldn’t wish to be anywhere else.
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