Power Trip
Meet the Existentialist Bodybuilder
‘Powerlifting gave me the butt of my dreams. It also taught me about death.’
When you lift weights enough to look like you lift weights, people have all sorts of questions.
“How much you bench?” (As much as I can.) “What gym do you go to?” (The one that’s open when I go.) “What program are you on?” (Time, dragging us all toward the void as we claw the dirt.) Questions usually stop there.
Programs. Plans. Training. Goals. We’ve come up with a lot of concepts and structures designed to imbue our workouts with a sense of purpose and make the act of repeatedly lifting weights feel like less than a literal exercise in absurdity. Some of them work; most of them don’t — not because the plans are bad, but because we are human and we fail ourselves.
Over the past 10 years or so — as fitness has become our national pastime and preoccupation — I’ve undergone a transformation that has not only bestowed upon me 50 extra pounds of body weight, a butt that (if I may speak for it) refuses to quit, and a new and omnipresent (by my husband’s reporting) cumin-esque musk, but also a not-necessarily-motivational mind-set about what it is I’m doing at the gym, why I go, what program I am indeed on.
