Results Above Average II
Liz E. Smith                                                                                               

“Your knees are sweating…”
Meghan says this after forty minutes of putting me through my paces downstairs in the dungeon at Herb and Doug’s Spartacus gym off Commercial Drive. We’ve—meaning, I’ve—squatted, skull-crushed, and crunched my way over to a nasty-looking contraption in the corner of the gym that requires I hunch over and crawl in among a series of levers and bars until I’m perfectly prone and about to “wail on my hamstrings.”

“I didn’t know knees could sweat,” Meghan says. “That’s intense.”

I wouldn’t know. I am so accustomed to sweating at this point, my eyeballs could sweat and I wouldn’t know the difference. This was not always so. I’ve been training with Meghan Cooke now for almost six months and I’d say it took at least three before my body started to realize it was actually supposed to sweat. I’m sure there’s some kind of science to this. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m here to tell you when you go from zero to “active” your body’s going to take some adjusting. Mine, accustomed to sitting for months at a time at a keyboard, took some serious convincing before it would believe we were actually exercising. In fact, when I first started taking my body to the gym, I ran into an old girlfriend of mine. She was in terrific shape and sweating like a Champ. I recall thinking I have never sweated like that in my life.

Well the floodgates have opened, friends. Now, I’m the Champ. And I don’t mind saying there have been some other developments besides my newly functioning sebaceous glands (ick). Every month, without fail, I have lost about two percent of my body fat, and about three pounds of mass for a total of twenty–two pounds lost. Not too shabby. I’ve lost inches from every single part of my body: arms, legs, hips, chest, back. I’ve built muscle, and I have abs. Welcome, abs. I didn’t even know you existed.

How has this happened? I would like, for a moment, to direct your attention to the delightful Ananda who works the front desk at my gym. Ananda, who has lost over one-hundred-and-fifty pounds and can dead lift a Smart Car, knows what it takes to get strong. “Hey,” she said to me the other day, “You’re looking really great.”

“You’re hired, “ I said.
“No,” she said. “You’ve worked really hard.”

And there it was, the truth. I had worked really hard. And, in forgetting that key bit of narrative, I was reminded of why many overachieving bookish types don’t put their brains away and take their bodies to the gym. These kinds of perfectionists (among which I’ll include myself) suspect that if they can’t do a thing well, they ought not to do it at all lest they reveal themselves to be the fools they know they are. Of course, this kind of thinking undermines the amount of sheer hard work it takes to do anything well. In a recent cartoon in The New Yorker, a humiliated woman is bent over, stuck, in some sort of cruel-looking weight-lifting machine. A personal trainer hovers over her with a whistle around his neck. “Feel like an idiot yet?” he asks.

No one wants to feel like a fool. But like any skill worth perfecting, learning to take care of our bodies requires hard work: diligence, consistency, excellent teachers, supporters, and the willingness to fail a lot before you succeed—and, let’s face it, some of us succeed at failing a little more than others. The kind of perseverance needed to succeed at the gym requires not only hard physical work, but also hard mental work. Sometimes, that’s the hardest kind of work there is. It’s nothing new to say we are surrounded by cultural reinforcements that seem designed to make us feel like less than we are. Most of us, in fact, seem savvily prepared to steel ourselves against the tide of media messages designed to encourage us to live dangerous lives. But, occasionally, we can still be blindsided. It’s hard to be prepared. And, here, I’m thinking of the diminutive Asian lady I encountered on the bus the other day who, after discovering I didn’t drink sugary beverages and went regularly to the gym, still cried out, “Why you fat!?” in her distinctly outdoor voice; and also the dear friend who, after hearing my concern about falling on some seriously hard Montreal ice, commiserated, “of course, you’d be concerned…you’re at an age now where you might not get up.”

Uh, I’m thirty-two. Since when does that make me a candidate for Life Alert? And, uh, I’m Ukrainian. I’m never going to be able to shop for shoes, let alone a party dress, at Richmond’s Yaohan Centre. Call me sensitive, but it’s hard to be prepared for insensitivity. As a child it came on Sports Day as my fifth-grade compatriots chanted boom boom boom as I trotted across the track-and-field field. And today it comes in the form of strangers and friends for whom between brain and mouth there is no interlocutor. Not to mention there is something about changing your body in significantly “positive” ways that creates a kind of safe space for people who know you to start making comments about your ass. I don’t know how I feel about this just yet. On the one hand, I want friends and family to notice how much work I’ve put into my fitness routine, but on the other I don’t want people to notice the work I’ve put into my body any more than I want readers to notice how much work I’ve put into my writing. Which is to say my body and my being are one thing, indivisible, and my own. What are we supposed to say, after all, when our own families, our partners even, feel they must correct themselves when they pay us a compliment? “You look great,” they’ll say, and then, “but you always looked great.”
Nice.

Right now, the hardest part of my training is the jumping squat. This is where you jump on the spot and land in a squat. And you don’t hang around at the bottom, either. You propel yourself into another leap from that squatting position and repeat. Over time, the jump evolves from a shallow jumping squat to a much bigger movement that involves your arms. At the bottom of the jump, you touch the floor with your hands; at the top, you reach for the ceiling. The movement requires core strength, that is your abdominal- and back muscles remain engaged and help maintain your balance. Also, your leg muscles must be strong enough to propel you upward and flexible enough to allow you to land in a squatting position. Your cardiovascular system has to be in good repair as well, since the movement requires a good deal of breath and gets your heart rate up almost as quickly as running on a treadmill. I find the movement difficult not only because it’s physically challenging, but also because it’s daunting. I am almost always certain I won’t be able to do it. I’ll stand there preparing for the movement like a horse about to refuse a jump and Meghan will say, “You’re thinking too much.”

For a writer, that’s kind of like hearing “you’re breathing too much.” Only, it’s not. Think about what you do well. I don’t care what it is. Maybe it’s playing the piano or the stock market, I don’t know. Whatever it is, when you are doing what you do best, you don’t really have to think about the act of doing it, at least not in a considered, ponderous sense. The things we do well come “naturally” to us because experience tells us we can trust we’re not going to blow it; the notes or the words or the movements are just there. When we were kids, most of us knew how to use our bodies in this way too. We ran and jumped and played because that’s what kids do. They don’t stand in front of the monkey bars and wonder if they can climb them. They just climb them.

One morning, I asked Meghan what she thinks about when she’s lifting a particularly heavy weight or completing some sort of monstrous set. “Nothing,” she said. “I don’t think about anything.” And while I’m pretty sure she occasionally thinks about how her butt is going to play out in red spangled hot shorts at a bodybuilding competition near you, I’m also happy to accept she thinks about nothing at all. There’s something rather Zen about the notion. And don’t we all want our teachers to get a little Zen now and then? Well, this morning at the gym I started a new program, so I gave this whole “thinking about nothing” thing a try. And, you know, I think it worked. I’ve finally worked my way up to using some of the real weight-lifting machines and it seems a little dangerous—heavy barbells hanging overhead and all—so maybe it’s the old Fear Of Death hanging over me that’s clicked my concentration into place, but you know what I didn’t think about this morning? Friends and strangers who might mock my girth; cruel boys on the elementary school playground; the New Yorker; global warming; family obligations; my sweaty knees; how hard I’ve worked at the gym; cultural reinforcements that seem designed to make me feel like less than I am; work, work, work. All of this took a back seat to a barbell. What kind of sequined guru is this Meghan Cooke? I can practically hear her mantra from across town as I’m writing this: When you are eating, just eat. When you are jumping, just jump. Dude…that’s deep.