TV party tonight

On not learning from the Iron.

“I never reached a place where I delighted in constantly pushing through sweaty workouts and eating raw vegetables. Instead, I was left with only the meagre set of ‘good’ foods I was allowed to eat and miles of cardio that kept unraveling forever, like a clown unspooling silk scarves from its mouth.”—Casey Johnston, I didn’t start weightlifting because I wanted to be strong

“I hated myself all the time.”—Henry Rollins, Iron and the Soul

Mum got me my first gym membership when I was about 14. A couple of weeks earlier, on the flight back from our annual Gold Coast holiday, I overheard my parents arguing from the row in front. Mum was worried about my weight. Something needed to be done. Next I remember, I was in the local gym’s consultation room, wearing my huge, grey t-shirt embroidered with a frowning cat and the words NOT IMPRESSED.

“You certainly don’t look very impressed,” said the well-meaning guy who ran this particular local gym, which was probably called Southlands Fitness. He emphasised that I would be their youngest client by a large margin, and confirmed with my mother that she would drop me off and pick me up. What I didn’t know as I was avoiding eye contact, being weighed and measured, and doing my running test on the Southlands Fitness treadmill, was that I was about to fall in love with exercise.

Of course, I was mortified to begin with. I dreaded someone from school seeing me as I snuck in the gym entrance, and loathed signing in at the reception desk (“Here she is! It’s Alice!!!”). But after a while, I realised my new situation offered certain advantages. At school, physical activity meant dodging the spectacularly mean bullies who ruled my year level and dealing with screeching teachers. Here, I was blissfully alone. I discovered that I loved the feeling of pushing myself during a workout, the high that came with being finished, and the soreness I felt the next day. Limping down the stairs after English, I’d loudly remind my friends that this was merely because I’d gone too hard at Body Pump. Just gym things.

All this was around 1996 (it’s hard to pinpoint because these memories are attached to both that final Gold Coast holiday and the time after my parents divorced). Since then, I’ve rarely been without a gym membership or exercise plan of some description. I’ve done aerobics, aquarobics, barre, mat pilates, boxing, HIIT, that weird tied-to-the-wall thing Miley Cyrus does in the “Flowers” clip, Couch to 5k, long-distance running, 30-minute workouts, 7-minute workouts, Zoom workouts, dance classes, animal movement classes, and every kind of yoga except aerial. I’ve exercised with friends, with strangers, alone, and while watching those weird people on Apple Fitness+. I’ve worked out in hotels, parks, and foreign cities. My best-ever run was the Stanford Dish track, even after I tripped on a tree root and skinned my palms.

I now understand that Mum took me to the local gym because she was worried, not because she wanted to punish or shame me. I get that she was a woman in her early fifties, stretched between the needs of two teenagers from her current marriage, two twenty-somethings from her previous, and a husband who was only half there. She was worried about basically everything.

(Once I was signed up at the gym, Mum gingerly mentioned the possibility of my going to see a dietician, and I baulked. I look back at this as a bit of a Sliding Doors moment, because it’s taken me the intervening 30ish years to create an even vaguely sane relationship with food. Then again, while Mum was right to suspect that exercise alone wasn’t going to cut it, I don’t think any 90s dietician would’ve stood a chance against my cat t-shirt.)

I came across Casey Johnston’s writing about a year ago, at a new or maybe just different low in my relationship with my body. Johnston is a former tech journalist who now writes mostly about how weightlifting got her off both the diet treadmill and literal treadmills. Her piece in the The Cut spoke to an exhausted part of me:

“I wish I could say that I got into lifting weights because I wanted to be strong. I wish I could say I had reached ultimate enlightenment and detachment from my corporeal form, that weight and size were nothing but numbers. I wish I could say that I not only didn’t fear being bulky but embraced and desired it; that I wanted to enter the room shoulders and biceps first because I only fit through the door sideways. In truth, I just wanted abs. I wanted to be a size small. I also wanted all of this to be easy, and every other workout I tried only got endlessly harder.”

She writes about the despair of no longer being able to lose weight despite upping her exercise and cutting her calories, and the liberation of discovering lifting, which allows her to eat much more and work out much less. “I had trapped myself in a cycle of eating less food and doing more exercise just to keep my weight where it was; the only thing left to try was to throw it all into reverse.”

I read this article over and over. I pulled it up on my phone in bed. I looked at it during the day. Could she be right? Could this possibly be right? Sensing my new obsession, Thom bought me Casey’s book, A Physical Education. I read it in about a day and a half. Then I joined another gym.

This gym is a four-minute walk from my house. The clientele is mostly older, mostly doing some form of rehab, directed by a small crew of earnest PTs. David never fails to make a non-joke about the weather when I walk in (it’ll be freezing rain and he’ll be like: “Good morning, Alice! Enjoying the beautiful sunshine today?”). Michael runs the place, can talk at you for 15 minutes straight about squat form, and basically always speaks at a level just below shouting. Matt, similar. Frank is quiet and sweet and my favourite, but I don’t think he remembers my name.

Previous gyms have been places of catharsis for me—places where I take bad days and bad feelings and work them the fuck out. This gym is not like that. I’m there because this is the closest place with racks, bars, and plates. When I signed up, Michael tried to sell me on all the other stuff they offer and I basically cut him off: “I just want to use your weights.” I managed not to say: I just read this book by Casey Johnston and honestly, Michael, this is my final attempt at not hating myself.

At first, I went along with the silly little program the guys made for me, both to humour them and because the bar alone was too heavy at that point. Then one day, I asked David (specifically not Michael) whether it was ok to keep coming but to do my own program. Two days later, I started doing what Casey does—an old-school weightlifting program called “Starting Strength”. It works like this:

• Day A you do squats, overhead presses, and deadlifts.

• Day B you do squats, bench presses, and deadlifts.

• You do three sets of five for everything, except deadlifts you do one set of five.

• That’s it.

And you’re only allowed to do it every second day, max. The rest of the time, you rest. If I include getting changed, walking over, responding to David’s weather joke, warming up, and the actual lifting itself, the whole operation takes less than 45 minutes door-to-door.

Like Casey, I was locked in a battle between my dwindling motivation and the assumption that fairly extreme daily cardio is the only exercise that counts. I started out skeptical of this new routine, which seemed to take too little time and effort to be worth anything, and might secretly be a quick way to gain 20 kilos. But gradually, as Casey promised, I was able to lift heavier. I didn’t gain any weight. I didn’t get “bulky”. Everything stayed about the same, except I got stronger, just like she said I would.

Here’s the bit where you’re expecting the transformation. The after shot. The satisfying end to the redemption arc. The Things Weightlifting Taught Me. Rollins ends his short, semi-legendary weightlifting essay with this:

“The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.”

Which, yes. We love you, Henry. But for me, “the Iron” isn’t quite like that.

I haven’t been transformed, reached the end of an arc, or even been able to track my progress in a straight line. The “journey” has been non-linear AF, complete with injuries that have sent me back to working at bodyweight (poor form on my part, should’ve listened to Michael), and times when I just didn’t think I could take another weather joke. I don’t love this gym. I don’t even love weightlifting, really. I’m not sure I have it in me to love exercise the way I used to.

If weightlifting’s taught me anything, it’s something boring about patience, or acceptance, or some other thing that isn’t going to get me a book deal. Something basic that I nevertheless still needed to learn as a person who sucks at taking life as it comes. Not my strong suit. I’m great at kicking and screaming, begging, scheming, squirming into and out of things, and generally making a fuss about what’s not going my way that week. Show me a situation I can’t do much about, and I’ll find a way to force change upon it, or upon myself.

Weights are, as Rollins emphasises, always the same. Progress can’t be rushed. Try to force something and you’ll tear a ligament, or drop a plate on your toe. Weights are stubborn, and the only thing they reward is stubbornness on your part. Show up, even when you don’t want to, even when everything’s a total drag, and you might get to increase your weight by a few kilos, which will feel pretty bad the first time you do it. No runner’s high. No high fives. No sudden transformation. More weight.

Most days, the progress I get is simply not going backwards. I get, now, that this has to be enough.