I lift weights at lunch when I’m at work. If you know me personally, this may surprise you because I do not look like a weight lifter. A coworker used to tell me that I looked, “90 pounds, soaking wet.” And that’s fine. I lift weights to be healthy and to make sure I’ll be able to keep up with my kids when they’re older. I do not lift weights to feel or look cool.
The gym I normally lift at does not have mirrors on the
walls. Mirrors are common at gyms because they allow you to watch your form and
to check out your bulging biceps. Since the majority of my time lifting weights has
been without mirrors, I’ve relied on friends for form corrections and had to
forgo the aforementioned bicep admiration.
I did not realize how wonderful a lack of mirrors was until
I went to a gym that had mirrors. One of the things I love about lifting is the
feeling of lifting heavy things. The word “heavy” here is relative. I lift
heavy for me, not heavy for Schwarzenegger. The feeling when you lift something
that’s right on the edge of your body’s physical limit is pretty awesome. You
get this endorphin rush and feel like you’re ten times as large you really are.
It becomes impossible to walk like a normal human being. After hitting a PR
(personal record), I walk around like I’m King Kong in a world of baby chimps, like
I am the alpha lifter.
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| Franko Columbo: An actual alpha lifter |
But back to the mirrors. You see, prior to that fateful day,
I did not know how I looked while hitting a PR. I knew what it felt like. I
felt like I was riding a raptor while dual wielding lightsabers. Or like I was Superman
smashing Zod with a semitruck. Or like I was tapping into the wellspring of
geothermal power from the very core of the earth and channeling it through my
muscles like some all-mighty-rock-thing. In short, it felt good. But then I saw
myself when doing it.
Have you ever really had to poop and not been able to and
tried really hard anyway? Because that’s what I saw when I looked in the mirror.
A sweaty, skinny guy with his neck veins bulging, face red from exertion,
eyeballs trying to squeeze from my skull, and lifting tiny weights. The look
was as opposite the feeling as is physically possible. Imagine feeling like a
lion and seeing a tiny kitten in the mirror. But not a cute kitten. A tiny
little thing struggling to poop and failing. A poop-failure kitten.
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| Poop-failure kitten |
And now, when I’m struggling for a PR, I get flashes of that
moment in that gym with those cursed mirrors, and I struggle not against the
weight but against laughing at the absurdity I’m bringing to the world. Life is
hard.
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