Anyone that works out seriously will eventually be asked why. Why put this much time and effort in? There’s a million answers to that because there’s a million people that take fitness beyond what’s necessary to live to a healthy life.
Here’s mine.
Like most millennials, I crave authenticity. Being born into the corporate hell-world of the Reagan years made many of us leery of everything. The infotainment of Saturday mornings, designed more to sell action figures than to be any sort of art, forced us all to put up shields of irony. Coming of age during both the great recession and the end of our time limit to do something about global climate change means developing a certain detachment from dire nature of reality. It’s coping mechanisms many of us have been forced to develop because of the near cyberpunk conditions we’ve been raised in.
And all I want to is to put down my guard down and genuinely enjoy something.
This is why I watch sports. Well, scratch that, I originally watched sports because I was born into the religion of Wisconsin. Not Catholicism (but that too), but the Green Bay Packers fandom. My grandmother remains, into her 90s, one of the biggest fans of the team I know. When you’re indoctrinated young, questioning is something you have to learn. And I did learn it, when I became a video game playing theater kid, it seemed natural to question “sports ball.”
I came back to it because I craved something real.
Like most unpopular kids rejected by the mainstream, it was very easy for me to reject it back as a defense mechanism. To me, one of my biggest steps in “growing up,” was to stop childishly rejecting things just because they were popular. Coming back to the buffet of pop culture after a decade or so in the wilderness of convincing myself that LCD Soundsystem was actually an enjoyable band and I really did like Todd Solondz movies, I had grown up to the point where I would enjoy things because I liked them, not because of what they signaled about me.
And the big question is why? Why do I like any given thing? Sometimes, that’s a tough question to answer. There’s a whole branch of philosophy, aesthetics, that attempts to answer this question.
For sports, there are a few reasons. I like the way it creates community, for one. Bringing a bunch of people together because they all enjoy the local team is, overall, a good thing in our increasingly atomized society. I like the strategy, the mental aspect of it, just as much as the idea of physically pushing yourself to a limit. There’s something to be said for watching talented people do skillful things.
But the biggest reason is because sports are real.
Authenticity is in short supply in a world where the Wendy’s twitter account does epic clap backs to its rivals and it gets written up in our favorite #content curation blog, brought to you by Saudi oil money. When the latest viral video of two guys yelling at each other in the street is not a rare moment in human interaction accidentally caught on camera but an engineered event to draw eyeballs, we can feel exhausted and used by everything around us. There’s a lot of coping mechanisms developed to deal with our increasingly plastic, corporate run world, but most of them leave a hole in our heart looking for authenticity.
Enter the big sports moments. The hail mary passes, the last minute header, the epic comeback. The pure human emotion on athlete’s faces when they beat the odds or win the big game or fall just short of achieving a life long dream is inescapably real. Even as we watch it on the Toyota Halftime Presented by Papa Johns, the authenticity is too bright to be covered by the layer of profitability scaled around it. It shines through the muck of corporate synergy to give us some pure moments of human experiences.
This isn’t say sports are too pure for this world. One need only follow whatever the most recent news cycle is around FIFA to see how sports cannot escape the realities of geohell. But there is some truth there at its core. Some base level humanity that still manages to bubble to the top and give us legitimate moments.
This is why I lift.
In a world that asks us “what’s your #brand” on Twitter or to give people the highlight reel of our lives on Facebook, finding pure moments of authenticity in and of myself feels like a difficult task. I can find those moments of humanity more easily with others. The love I feel for my extended family, the joy of teaching my son something new, the warmth of holding my wife in my arms. But to find what’s real in me alone seems so much more daunting after wondering what’s being sold to me with a viral post on Reddit.
I’ve got different motivations that have pushed me through the doors of the gym over the years. Having a kid is the biggest one. When my wife and I decided we would try for a kid, I read that a father’s fitness correlates highly with their children’s and I hit the gym harder. Knowing I would be in my 50s when my son is in his teens was another kick in the pants; I want to be able to keep up with him, at least somewhat. There’s also the factor of practical strength, being able to load myself down like a mule with all the baby items and carry him around has been super useful. And, of course, the role model factor. I have looked up to my dad in part because he is a giant, strong man with rough hands. Weak, ignorant and lazy is not a good role-model.
But that’s all motivation. It comes and goes. It’s good to tap it, but unwise to rely on it. Discipline is what brings us to the gym on days with temperatures in the single digits with a nose full of snot and only a handful of hours of sleep in the tank. And discipline, for me, comes from the authenticity of lifting.
No one really has said that better since Henry Rollins back in 1994, so rather than reinvent the wheel, here is the money quote from his essay The Iron and the Soul:
The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds.
I can post a selfie that gets a hundred likes or zero. I can read various political camps spin the latest news a million ways. But when I get to the gym, it’s just me and gravity.
And that’s why I lift.
