Iron Man.

Originally published in The Chronotype.

Like many men of my generation, I wasn’t introduced to weight training till my 40s. My
high school didn’t have anything approaching a weight room. We had a set of used free weights
that my dad, the superintendent, had bought from nearby UW-Platteville. They sat on the stage in our gym, gathering dust. None of the coaches knew anything about weight-training. Although
our teams were pretty good, we would’ve been demolished by today’s kids, bulked up by hours
in the weight room and trained in summer camps.

Even professional athletes scorned weight training in those days. It was said that the only
player on Lombardi’s Packers who lifted was fullback Jim Taylor. Although tough as nails on the
field, he was regarded as a bit of a nut by his fellows, whose weight-training generally consisted
of lifting beer steins. (Except for Bart Starr, who lifted milk bottles.) Wilt Chamberlain, perhaps
the greatest basketball player of all time, would bring weights with him on road trips. They did
the trick; one season he averaged over 50 points per game.

I began fiddling around in a gym during my late 20s, but it wasn’t until several years later
that I started taking it somewhat seriously. I fell for a woman whose devotion to fitness was light
years ahead of what I was used to, and I quickly realized that if I wanted Sue to take me to the
beaches of the Caribbean, I’d better look like I belonged on them. So began a relationship with
Olympic Fitness in Rice Lake that’s now in its fourth decade. As she joins me there occasionally to
lift, I team up with her for classes at 4EverFit, not to mention personal training that has helped
me rehab two knee replacements in record time.

Last spring, I decided to challenge myself by taking up a certain lift. Known as the “King
of Lifts,” the deadlift works almost every muscle in the body. Like virtually all lifts, the deadlift
is very simple: put weights on a bar, squat down, then lift it to a standing position. Then you
lower it, and repeat. (Grunting is allowed during the lift. Occasional rough language is optional.)
With advice from Brady at Olympic Fitness and a fine tutorial on the Art of Manliness website, I
was able to get the form down and set a goal: exceed my body weight by my birthday in October.
I increased the weight by 10 pounds a month and worked my way up to 3 sets of 4 lifts per
session, two or three times a week.

Somewhat to my surprise, it went pretty smoothly. Like martial arts training,
weightlifting requires focusing on form first, with power to follow. I was up to 235 pounds, safely
above my body weight, by my 67th birthday. What’s next? Continue lifting, of course, and my
new goal is 300 pounds by the end of 2024.

Internet ads will tout various dietary supplements that will provide wondrous results, and
I do take a couple daily, but nothing replaces doing the actual work. For seniors, “use it or lose
it” applies. Why do many seniors have trouble climbing stairs, or getting up off the floor?
Because they’ve forgotten how to do it and allowed their bodies to become weak.
Not me. Now that I have the King of Lifts to help me, the sky’s the limit. Well, maybe.
There will be a level of weight that I simply won’t be able to achieve. I wondered what that
might be, so I looked up the world record: 1210 pounds, set last year by a Ukrainian who lifted two sets of Hummer tires, four on each end of the bar. I think I’ll let him hang onto that one for a while.