Plague of Strength

That’s all it takes to be a hero. Everyone thinks it’s a full-time job. Wake up a hero. Brush your teeth a hero. Go to work a hero. Not true. Over a lifetime, there are only four or five moments that really matter. Moments when you’re offered a choice, to make a sacrifice, conquer a flaw, save a friend, spare an enemy. In these moments, everything else falls away. The way the world sees us, the way we… *pukes*

(Deadpool)

Though it should be obvious, we all seem to forget one simple rule: sometimes you need to nut the fuck up, accept that you have to slog through shit to get to paradise, and light a fire under your own ass. It’s about being the hero in your “movie”, not just an extra. In light of Deadpool shooting the villain rather than being a “hero”, I am going to get right to the points of today’s post, brought to you indirectly by: abject high school fuckery, wholesale emotional blackmail, and flat out douche-baggery…

Don’t put your dick in crazy…

That is the advice a friend of mine in the Army gives all his new troops. Every guy thinks crazy in a chick is the fucking cutest thing ever, until all of his shit is on fire, his dog is missing and he is nursing a couple extra holes in his body. Let’s be honest with ourselves. Crazy is not a good look on ANYONE.

“Crazy” comes in a lot of forms, and left untreated, mental illness effectively wrecks your life. Whether it is a major mental illness or a “minor” one, mental illness will spread over everything, tainting it slowly, and making it harder to do things. Let’s be honest, the weak, diseased animals are the first to fall in the wild, and the same unfortunately is true of humans. If you are continuously battling your brain chemistry, you are not able to train effectively, nor are you able to even exist in a comfortable “space”. Surviving on angst, darkness and hatred really only works in John Wick movies.

*shrugs & places GIANT target on forehead*

I am speaking on this from experience. Three years ago, I was finally diagnosed with severe anxiety, and seriously started working on getting treatment for it. A little over a year ago, I was put on medication for the anxiety, and ADHD. After an arduous adjustment period where I lost a significant portion of my sense of taste (let me tell you, THAT is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy), I realized not only was I excelling professionally but also with my lifting (yeah, I will never be a pro. I do it for the love of it, but hitting PR’s is fucking awesome for anyone.) Rather than focusing on that ephemeral sense of doom or the blinding rage that came with a failed lift, I can actually pick heavy shit up & put it down and *gasp!* enjoy it. Shit… I can actually manage to walk into the gym, and I am not constantly exhausted from the physical tension that comes with anxiety.

If you think you could be suffering from a mental illness, go see a doctor. Yes, it is scary. Yes, if your don’t have insurance it can be expensive. And yes, despite the loss of multiple public figures from suicide and even more who probably silently suffered with dual diagnosis (mental illness coupled with substance abuse), there is still a stigma with getting help. But, the improvements you will see in your life will be worth it. And yes, I said a doctor. THEY are the ones who are qualified to diagnose you, not webMD, not Google, not that Facebook quiz your cousin Becky posted that stressed it was scary accurate at picking your mental illness based on the foods your like, not Jamie, nor any other life or lifting coach out there.

The onus of your treatment is on no one but you. You are the person who has to do the heavy lifting.

And it will suck…

There will be days where you back slide, and there will be days it feels like you aren’t getting anywhere. The more baggage you allow yourself to carry, the more you will struggle. Shit, some people I have met have more baggage than Louis Vuitton, which is fucking impressive. But at some point, of huffing and puffing and dragging yourself through shit, you will manage to look up and realize you are somewhere completely different; where along the way you got rid of a lot of the “essential” baggage you were dragging.

I’d Lie for You and That’s the Truth

• I once caught a fish THIS big!
• But Mom, we ONLY kissed!
• Babe, of COURSE you look great in those high waist mom jeans!
• I NEVER miss leg day!
• I have a 1,100 kg total.

I really never thought this needed to be said, but stop fucking lying to yourself and everyone else. Stop lying to elicit sympathy, and stop lying to try to make yourself sound bigger and badder. Ok? We all know why you had a shitty day lifting. You don’t need to Instagram a fucking book about it. We all have shitty days lifting. Ask Jamie about the day I dropped 175 lbs on my chest like it was a thousand pounds after doing multiples with it a week or 2 earlier (I would have been less surprised if Jamie had just dropped the barbell on me with no warning). Its called an off day, we all have them. You brush yourself off, and move the fuck on.

More importantly, stop fucking lying about how heavy you can lift!

You aren’t impressing anyone, nor are you doing yourself any favors. I had a teenager come into the supplement shop where I work part time, with his friends, and brag to me that he needed protein because he is benching 200 lbs (which would have been an approximately double body weigh bench for him, while he coincidentally had arms like twigs). I laughed in his face, and told him to try again because I knew the chances of that were slim or none, or he could shut up, and I could give him advice on how to actually reach a 200 lb bench (first step is actually lift weights consistently). Needless to say, I didn’t close that sale, and he stomped out, with his friends trailing behind, laughing their asses off at him because a chick called him out on his bullshit.

The people you are trying to impress don’t believe you, it makes you look stupid, and you are setting yourself up fail. Why? Cause you are lying to yourself too, aren’t you? Dig really deep and think back to that last whingy IG post you made. No… not that one about how your cat is the best thing in your life and you wouldn’t have gotten where you are without them… the ones before that one where your cried about loving your coaches for supporting you and how you just didn’t have “IT” at the gym that day, but good golly you tried!

You obviously missed those lifts because Mercury being in retrograde combined with Starbucks not making your latte right; not because you spend more time taking selfies in the gym than you do actually lifting. It didn’t have anything to do with you constantly letting yourself off the hook for shitty performance. It totally didn’t have anything to do with the fact that you really didn’t try all that hard. And it definitely didn’t have anything to do with the fact you have spent so much time bragging about shit you can’t do, that you have no compunction about lying to yourself about your shitty performance on shit you can.

Take only what you can carry!

BUT!… My matched LUGGAGE! – Princess Vespa

This is where Jamie and my opinions are about to differ wildly. Because I actually see a need for “weak” coaches [Editor’s note- beginners need minor guidance, not “coaches,” and if they’re weak, they obviously don’t know what they’re fucking talking about]. To me, they serve a purpose. They are the ones who initially teach people to lift their own weights. They are the ones who lay the foundations for true monsters to build greatness upon [Editor’s note]- true monsters need no such thing]. They are the ones who keep the feeble safe from the monsters, because not everyone has it in them to blaze their own path and be a monster.

But at some point in order to become a monster, the training wheels need to come off. Weights generally shouldn’t be chosen because a coach or an excel spreadsheet picked them. At some point, you need to do shit on your own without hand holding. The only person lifting those weights and pushing you forward, is you. And doing crazy shit for the sake of being a monster is a blast.

When Jamie and I got together, I wasn’t a big lifter. I mean… I was at the gym lifting consistently 4+ days a week, but I still had enough Koolade running through my veins that I thought I could get by with squats, deads, cleans, jerks, and snatches. Fuck machines, and fuck those retarded assholes who did stupid shit like shrugging in what I saw as squat racks. That shit was no man’s land.

It was not until May of last year, a full 4 months or so of following Jamie around no man’s land like a lost puppy getting the lay of the land; both of us bored with doing the same shit over and over, that we decided to play a game. We both got to pick an exercise for us to do. I was inspired by Jamie’s article about Chuck Ahrens. I remember looking at Jamie, shrugging and saying “fuck it, I don’t know what they are, but lets do skull crushers!”

Ok… full disclosure, knowing me, it was actually probably closer to “how bout those skull thingies you were writing about.” [Editor’s note: A year later, she still refers to laterals as “flappies.”] [Author’s note on the Editor’s note: Yeah, I do. But, in my defense, I have to remember a ton of shit for my day job, so everything else is details. My form on them is correct, and they do look like you are flapping your arms!]

And let me tell you… I practically CRIED through that first set. I hated them with the burning passion of a thousand suns. I still do. But I’ll sure as shit throw weight on a bar or grab dumbbells and do them when I am bored, or sore, or pms’ing, or the day ends in y. Sometimes i do drop sets, others I do lucky 7’s [Editor’s note: I think she means 21s], others I just build to as high of a weight as I can do at least 5 reps. But I don’t need someone to tell me to do them. I just suck it up and make my poor triceps weep over the corpses of their torn brethren.

These days, Jamie and I are just as likely to be alternating machines, as we are to be on opposite sides of the gym doing our own thing. I have become the queen of finding weaknesses and working on correcting them; Jamie is still just in it to scare the shit out of yoga moms and make the other guys at the gym cry into their protein. But it is nothing more than lifting your own weights.

Deep Thoughts

Correcting weaknesses, trying for PR’s or scaring yoga moms; accomplishing anything still comes down to shutting up and actually doing it. It comes down to being in a good head-space and not having to battle your brain’s chemicals for control. And it comes down to being honest with yourself, and others.

What inspired this treatise on self-responsibility in lifting and life?

This all boiled down to one single reactionary thought that I couldn’t get out of my head:

Your individual heroes do not owe you a single fucking thing.

The people you prop up in your mind as your personal heroes don’t owe you a fucking thing, and the onus is not on THEM to prop up your fragile ego and fractured mental health. Unless you are paying for their time and energy, they do not, in fact, owe you a millisecond of their time simply because you are demanding the attention. They do not hang by their computers/phones to clap you on the back when you succeed or to wipe away your tears and snot when you fail; they are not exclusively there for you and you alone. They all have lives, and jobs, and families, and problems of their own.

There is not a single “famous” person I have met, who will not take time for their fans. Except maybe Lords of Acid, but… for every Lords of Acid, there is an Andrew WK who is 100% about his fans. But at some point there is a limit to what Names (a wrestling term for famous wrestlers, but I generally use it for those who have any sort of notoriety) actually have to put up with. In my case as a pro-wrestler, my limit with fan interactions came when a wrestling fan showed up at my house at like 10 pm one night, hammered, demanding I go out with him. Nice guy, hysterically inappropriate delivery. In Jamie’s case, I’m pretty sure that limit came this weekend, when a “fan” :

• Called him repeatedly on Messenger even after Jamie had asked him multiple times to please stop because Jamie was at work (and a dozen or more times before that).
• Got pissed at Jamie for not answering… when Jamie was working
• Threatened to kill himself by squatting a weight that would “crush his spine” (hysterical, I know… I almost snarfed a Bang as Jamie was telling me this)
• Blocked Jamie
• Faked his own fucking suicide by pretended to be his cousin to tell Jamie of said douchebag’s demise in epic high school girl fashion
• Expected Jamie to mourn him; gnashing his teeth and rending his hair in regret for not getting fired in order to talk to this jackass… only to have one of Jamie’s friends blow up this asshole’s spot and provide screen shots that he was posting shit on Facebook from beyond the grave.

The more I thought about what happened, and looked at all the abject fuckery in life, lifting and Facebook, the more I realized how simple shit is to fix if you are willing to. So I laid it out, in what ended up being very personal terms.

I think Deadpool said it best when he said,

“I didn’t ask to be super, and I’m no hero. But when you find out [something something something] the time has come to be a fucking superhero.”

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