grunt zen

 


Not much gets writ about the weights room, probably not where the effeminate types get their joy, but lucky for us most of the good writers were never insipid lounge lizards. The better they wrote it, in general, the bigger they lived it. Only teenagers think that poetry is something removed from life, and in the weights room life is alive and lifting. There is a saying about lifting; your bitch missus mighta left you or your job might suck, but 200 pounds is 200 pounds. Either you can tear it from the floor or you can't. It can't be faked, can't be sneaked up on, can't be earned off the back of another man. You gotta go, and keep going. Gotta be addicted to it. Gotta want that primal shit.      
       
People who don’t know think that it’s for fools, dumb jocks, men who are just meat, but I tell you what, the good ones, the strong ones, well, you don’t get strong by not knowing what you are doing, by not understanding your body, by not being able to listen, and most of all you gotta connect mind with body. Gotta get your head in the muscle. Gotta get yourself fueled up, and fired up. You gotta let go fear, then stand there in front of the weight bar, blanked out to all but that. Take it in your hands, straighten yourself, put your mind into the places that will have to do the work, and then lift. Feel it tear at you, heavy like it should crush. Feel everything take the load, even the bones in your feet spreading out in your shoes, your central nervous system now alive to the job, every fibre of you in the lift.        
       
You explode in to it, haul it up, hold a moment, veins bursting, then put it down, re-grip and do it again. 7 fuckin’ times do it again. The last 3 you aren’t sure if you’ll make it. The last one you will or you won’t, and that’s the most dangerous time, perfect for busting something if you let your mind wander too far from control. It’s a meditation, a grind, and pure joy, all rolled in to one hour of honest painful practice. Can’t lie to the bar. Can’t make excuses to the bar. Can’t talk the bar up in to the air. You just throw everything in to it and lift, lift because it’s hard.        
       
Not sure where I got it from. Used to wrestle, did lots of things that I needed my body for, but they all fell away with age, except the bar. I train at home now. Don’t need lycra and cute towels to sweat my eyeballs out on the floor, just need the iron, an hour, and good knees. Have thought about it a lotta times, about the how and why of it. I think it musta started with my old man, worked with his hands all his days. I was used to him being strong, but one day we were knocking an old shed down. It had a steel pipe chimney, 12 inches across, concrete lined inside, maybe 20 feet long. When it came down it punched a deep dent in the ground, one good thud-landing and no bounce. Then my old man gets one end of it in his hands, hauls it up to knee height, kinda crouches with it perched there, adjusts his grip to underhand, hauls again up to his shoulder, then walks forward a foot at a time to get his body underneath it, becomes the pivot. Finally he has walked up to the mid point. He rocks his body back to lift the low end free of the ground and stands there, eyes not aware of anything but the weight, then took a step, began to walk. I ran ahead opening gates, moving the wheelbarrow, running block for him while he was in that place where only the body is doing the talking. He musta carried that pipe 200 yards to dump it where it stayed beside the cowshed.        
       
I never forgot that lift, or the look in his eye, or the spread of his shoulders, or that deep grunted exhale when all the weight came on. It seemed like a language, some kind of communication of the body, and although I was just 5 I heard it, knew that one day I would understand it, and now I do it too. I go in to the weight room, warm up, get my mind sorted, switch my body on, then lift. Sometimes I make that sound that I remember, and there is a closeness to him in it that moment that all the women in my family, no matter what they know, cannot share about him, not in here, not this way. It is a language of the body, and it starts with 200 pounds.