August 2015
If this goes poorly, it will hurt. If it goes well, it’ll hurt differently.
The concrete sphere on the ground between my feet weighs at least as much as I do. Everyone else has had a turn picking it up and heaving it onto the face-high wooden platform. They’re watching as I place my hands on either side of the bottom of the sphere. How far can I wedge my fingers underneath it without fully crushing a digit? Patrick says, “You got this. Big breath!” I shift my hips back like I’m squat-hovering over a porta-potty, inhaling as directed. I squeeze my palms and forearms into the heavy ball. I pull on it with all my might.
It does not budge.
Not at all. It’s utterly unperturbed. My hands just slide up the sides of the concrete, and I get a few new scratches. Ouch. Six people saw me miss my attempt. More ouch. I step away for a second and shake out my arms. I’m sort of recovering from the effort and sort of waiting to see if someone is going to jump in and take their next turn. No one jumps in. Instead, they’ve started hyping me up again. “You’ve got this.” “Really set your grip.” “Easy weight!” “You can move this in your sleep.”
The small terrier-chihuahua mix sunning himself over in the corner of the patio couldn’t care less about my attempted feats of strength. He is unbothered by the yelling and uninspired by our toughness. He belongs to Kris and Melissa, the married trainers who own this gym. I met them a few months ago when their gym hosted a workshop called “Starting Strongman.” Anyone from the general public could sign up and come learn the basics of the sport of strongman from a sweet man named Kalle Beck. Kalle travels around the country, visiting other people’s gyms, teaching athletes how to do this niche activity.
You could trace the origins of the sport of strongman back to circus sideshows where a large man in a unitard would do something superhuman like hoist a giant dumbbell overhead, bend steel rods, pick up a car, or catch a cannonball fired at him. The circus strongman found his modern reincarnation in the late 1970s when a competition called World’s Strongest Man was created for CBS. When you were a kid, maybe you were like me and you watched World’s Strongest Man on Saturdays after cartoons and Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Powerlifters, body builders, football players, and other large, muscular men did feats of strength designed for maximum theatricality. Like gymnastics, strongman competitions include a series of events that test different skills and are fun to watch. Each competition consists of some mix of tasks like deadlifts and squats, log press, circus dumbbell press, truck pull, car carry, yoke walk, farmer’s walk, Husafell stone carry, or my favorite, Atlas stone loading. “Atlas stone” is what we call the concrete sphere that is evading my control this very day. Sometimes you pick it up and put it on a stationary platform. Sometimes you pick it up and throw it over this thing that’s essentially a really sturdy limbo bar. Sometimes you pick it up and perch it on your own shoulder. There’s lots of fun to be had with an Atlas stone. In order to make it easier to get a grip on the stone, strongman athletes cover their palms and forearms with a pine-resin-based goop called “tacky.” It’s extremely sticky. It’s stickier than you think. It helps you make big lifts, so you absolutely don’t care that it gets on everything and permanently stains your clothes, shoes, and car upholstery.
That’s why I’m now asking Patrick, “Can you pull this leaf off my thumb?” I’m covered in tacky and have no way of removing the bits of debris that find their way to me. He avails me of my leaf, looks me in the eye, and says, “Ready?” It’s a question but it’s a command. I say, “Let’s do this.”
I square up to the stone and bend over. I wedge my fingers under either side of the bottom of it and press my sticky palms into the concrete. In one move I inhale, sit back over the invisible toilet seat, and squeeze my forearms into the sides of the stone. With all of my ambition and ego and aggression and desire to show off, I push down through the soles of my chuck taylors and manage to pull that fucker into my lap! With the stone resting in my lap, I adjust my grip, wrapping my arms around the top third of it. I take another deep breath in, pushing my belly into the concrete and using it to brace my core. I drive down through my heels to stand up, thrusting my hips forward, and lifting my chest as high as I can. I focus on making my body as explosive as possible and the stone feels like a weightless afterthought. It lands on the platform and I use my hands to steady it. If I don’t steady it, the stone might bounce off of the wall and fall. No one wants to get their toes crushed while they celebrate a successful lift.
Everyone is cheering for me. I’m hopping around like Charlie Brown on a good day. I feel like one million dollars. I really wasn’t sure that I could do this. I didn’t know. And I was worried that if I tried my hardest I would hurt myself. I’d tweak my back or drop the stone on my foot or invent an entirely new way of being injured. But I learned how to do a new thing and I delivered when it was my turn to do it. I am euphoric.
We do a few more rounds of Atlas stones and finish the training session with sled pushes, a form of “strongman cardio.” You load up a flat “sled” with a bunch of 45 lb plates and push it back and forth across the patio as quickly as you can 6 - 8 times. Then you lay on the ground and try to catch your breath while your friend takes their turn. By the time everyone takes their turn we’re all splayed out on the sunny patio, chatting, using baby oil to clean tacky off of our bodies, and drinking whatever is left of the coffee that was hot when we arrived at 9am.
The Sunday morning strongman crew consists of:
Jessie, a cheesemonger who’s renovating her house
Melissa and Kris, the kind and enthusiastic married gym owners and dog parents
Julie, a former highschool English teacher studying to become a registered dietician
Matt, a quiet professional dancer and personal trainer
and Patrick, another professional-dancer-slash-personal-trainer.
Patrick is our ringleader. He knows more than we do about strongman and he just has the right leadership style for this particular pursuit and this particular cast of characters. He’s like a buff preschool teacher, but for weird adults.
I would stay and chat with everyone a bit longer, but I need to get home. Alfie has to go open up the bar in a few hours. If I get home soon maybe we can do something before he has to leave. We only have a few hours in between when he wakes up and when he has to go, and sometimes he’s so burnt out from bartending on Saturday night that he doesn’t want to do anything during our time together on Sunday. We’ll see what I find when I get home.
I get into my car, and with my hands on the steering wheel, I have a clear view of the bruise forming on my right bicep. If I accidentally get tacky on my bicep when I’m loading Atlas stones, I usually end up with a big purple bruise. It’s my souvenir. For the next week I get to remember that I like being big and powerful. I know how to square up to an odd object and move it. I know how to arrange my parts, where to brace and where to release, how to exert my power to get this massive thing to budge.
What I don’t know is that I’m going to have to stop training with the strongman group. This weekly joyfest will end in a matter of months. I’ll move to Petaluma for two years, trying to stave off divorce. I’ll start a new job in the entertainment industry. I’ll miss my workout buddies. I’ll end up losing strength and skill in the undertow of relationship chaos and career chaos. But I’ll also see that strongman gave me some fortitude, some substance, some inner thing that gets me through all that comes after. The lessons last longer than the bruises. Thank god I learned that I like being big and powerful. Thank god I know how to square up to an odd object and move it. I learned, just in time, how to arrange my parts, where to brace and where to release, how to exert my power to get a massive thing to budge.
Soon enough I’ll live in my own apartment, and anytime I get the urge to redecorate, I’ll move the furniture all by myself.