What I talk about when I talk about lifting

It’s raining. I’m standing in a queue and it’s raining. If you’ve read my previous post, Other, you’ll know how I feel about queues. If you haven’t, the long and short of it is this: I hate them and avoid them at all costs. 

But for this one, I’ve made an exception. For at the end of this queue lies something truly worth queuing for. Something I desperately want and need.

I say all this as if I’ve been here for hours. It’s actually been three minutes and the queue only exists because they haven’t opened the doors yet. But If I had to queue for hours in the pouring rain - for this - I would. There’s a young guy in front of me with a white t-shirt and a Peaky Blinders haircut. Headphones on, leaning against the wall, one knee jutting out like he’s James Dean. He knows. 

They open the doors. We file forward, keeping our distance, gelling our hands at the dispenser. A beep from the scanner, a push of the turnstile. And then we’re in. We disperse, walking quickly to our chosen destinations. And then. We begin. 

I wasn’t ‘sporty’ at school. In fact, I was what was then considered to be the opposite of sporty: bookish, fattish, soon to be fatter. The P.E. teachers focussed solely on the obviously athletic; their disdain for those who struggled to run three miles or anyone who couldn’t comfortably clear a hurdle, more than palpable. It wasn’t like other subjects. The message was abundantly clear: you can or you can’t. If you were any kind of fat - or worse, fat and Asian - your card was marked: CAN’T. Imagine if they took that stance in maths or English or science: ‘Sorry, you’re shit, so just sit in the corner while I work with the children who actually know what a fraction is’. 

The idea that someone could be encouraged or that perhaps if you didn’t look obviously athletic, you could still be good at sports - or actually enjoy them - didn’t exist. Like so many of the ideals we hold dear today, it simply hadn’t been invented yet - not at my school anyway. So, along with the other ‘unsporties’, I swallowed the verdict: NOT SPORTY, DEFUNCT, RUBBISH. Out we’d trudge: the rejects. Pulling our tops down, fiddling with our shorts, wishing we were anywhere but here. There we stood: unconfident, powerless, ashamed. 

I can still remember the dread, the terror, the nausea I felt the night before cross country. I remember begging my mum for a sick note, praying that there would be a timely thunderstorm. My friend recently told me she used to fantasise about the PE teacher dying just so she wouldn’t have to do cross country. We laughed about it, of course. But maybe it's not that funny. 

My legs are a blur in the mirror. One misstrike and I’m fucked. 20.5km per hour. The treadmill shakes. 15 seconds, 16, 17. I can’t feel my legs anymore. But I’ll hold on. I can do it. I know I can. 3-2-1. I jump onto the side panels and let out a cry. 

Of course I’m not blaming a few P.E teachers for my lack of physical confidence. They didn’t help, but like so many things, it was the culture, and they were merely a product of it. Without going into all of that, the end result was that I grew up thinking that sport and exercise were for other people. I doubled down on the cues and fed myself the narrative. I was bookish, not sporty. I liked drama, literature and music, thank you very much. 

In my mid-teens I discovered that exercise could serve a purpose. There was no joy - it was simply a tool to keep my weight low. My regime was punitive, rigorous, and constant. I’d run to school, run back and spend hours in my room doing crunches and jogging on the spot. The objective was skinniness, and it worked. It was a means to an end: the end being the ultimate goal of being smaller, thinner. Less.

In my twenties, I found a happier medium. I discovered my love for the gym. Everything about it appealed to me. Cool and glossy, the reassuring beat of pop-y dance music telling you that everything was going to be just fine. It was a place that knew what it was: a temple of self-improvement with a singular purpose. You came to sweat, to push yourself, to get that delicious endorphin hit. It required no team, no interaction, nothing but you and the machine. I spent most of my time on the treadmill - it was all about the cardio. I was happy. 

With encouragement from my husband (to be), I did my first 10k run in Richmond Park. I was petrified. What if I was last? I didn’t want people watching me, judging me, thinking I was slow. I’d never run in a race before so I had no idea what it would be like. I remember the final couple of hundred metres. There he was at the finish, waiting for me, cheering me on. I began to cry. It was like a scene from the cheesiest high school film; Journey was playing on my headphones as I wept my way across the finish line. Just a small town girl, livin’ in a lonely world… Here I was, running in a race, finishing a race. And I wasn’t ridiculous. And nobody was laughing. It was that easy to change your story, to write a new one.

I pull on my wrist wraps and wrap them around the bar. I like the way it feels: like I’m holding on to the handle bars of a motorbike. I’m connected to this bar now, it’s an extension of my body. I bend down, back straight, lats squeezed, bar tightly gripped. I stand up and it comes with me. My hips lock as I see myself in the mirror: powerful, strong. 

In my mid-thirties, I discovered weights and strength training. It felt immediately right. Running never felt like flying to me, the way it does for some people. But this, it fitted like a second skin. I learned to squat, deadlift, shoulder press. It came naturally. I was built for this. As the weights grew heavier, so my confidence grew, my determination. It changed everything.

For me, lifting heavy weights is a kind of salvation. If that sounds like hyperbole, it isn’t. With every lift, you connect to something primal, something within you that doesn’t really have a name. How often do you get to feel mighty? As a woman, maybe never. How often do you feel a self-belief so profound, it could make you cry? There’s something so real, so tangible, about lifting a heavy bar off the ground, or pushing one above your head - about fighting and winning. It happened and you can see it. It’s real, it’s now. Your body lifted it, pushed it, pressed it. It was there and now it’s here. Because of you. You made a decision, you took action. And here you stand: a warrior. You are Athena, Bia, Kali.

And the beautiful irony is this: it makes you feel as light as a bubble. With every lift, with every press, you push away all the weight of being human. You have no past or future, only now, with one simple purpose: to move this object. You’re a machine. If that’s not freedom, I don’t know what is.

You start to look at your body in a different way. I watched my thighs get bigger, and for the first time in my life, it made me happy. Lifting weights is about being more - you’re trying to get stronger. Not thinner, not faster. You want more power, more strength, bigger muscles. When I’m lifting, pushing, pressing, I have no words, no computer, no pen. But I am rewriting my story. Constantly. I think of all the times I felt my card was marked with CAN’T, by myself, by others, and I want to laugh. As fuck yous go, it doesn’t get better than that. 

And now it’s time to go. Peaky Blinders is in front of me again. He pushes the turnstile and gels his hands. I do the same. See you tomorrow, babes.