Issue 2: embodied

Down a long driveway of misshapen asphalt, past the boarded-up Dairy Queen where my friends hung out in high school, and toward a former used car lot, I park outside the gym. Shaky with nerves, I get my bag with my shoes, skipping rope, and foam roller from the trunk of my butt-ugly Toyota. The beginner’s class—we come dragging corpses of our former selves, distorted shadows, shapes we don’t want to be, and chronic aches from our daily lives, waiting for Liam. I’m a runner, with a list of injuries and motivated to get strong—to “bullet-proof” my knees. I used my 48th birthday as accelerant to finally get in the car and drive toward a better version of myself. That my birthday would be protection, a superpower, was a miscalculation. The sticky August night beads around the nape of my neck and pools along my bra-line.

I’m met with the acrid smell of burnt tires, gasoline and anxiety. There’s a deliberate simplicity to the equipment: plywood boxes, barbells, medicine balls, iron bars and thick ropes hanging from the ceiling. A haze of chalk dust scooped from buckets, clapped on hands. No mirrors. A playlist of Rage Against the Machine, Beastie Boys, Black Keys, and Metallica. Workouts named after women and military vets.

We’re a disparate collection. There are the sand-kicked-in-the-face skinny dudes, pliable grad students, mid-life deniers like me, and the sweet pear-shaped teen boy who must be seven feet tall. I’m intimidated by the three whippet-fit women who come to class. Scout and Maddie are twins with the narrow hip girdles of Lululemon mannequins and the fitness to jackrabbit through a dozen burpees while I struggle to do maybe four. Ellen, while older than me, holds her own with the twins and teaches martial arts in her spare time. I feel sloppy around them, like I’m hauling pendulous freight.

Today, Liam is going to teach us how to do a push press. At CrossFit, I won’t be able to escape barbells, which I’ve found intimidating and have avoided over the years. I’m a reluctant gym member, never understanding the appeal of a treadmill when you can just run or walk outdoors. I rely on the gym sporadically—mostly when I’m injured or need a rest day from running and turn to a stationary bike or the elliptical trainer.

I stand facing Liam as he gives step-by-step instructions on how to push press. Without visual feedback, the learning is experienced in my body. Liam is my mirror. To slam a barbell from rest on my sternum to overhead taps an aggression I don’t ever access. It’s scary at first.

I chalk up my hands, step toward the knurled silver bar, and situate my wrists. I find support from my collar bones, step backward away from the rack—a bit off balance with the weight—and watch him, straight in front of me. He’s already demonstrated the lift a couple of times. My fingers sweat. The cold bar fights against my skin.

In “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body,” Kathy Acker confesses she struggled for years to write an essay about bodybuilding and wondered about “the antagonism between bodybuilding and verbal language,” later explaining that “bodybuilding (a language of the body) rejects ordinary language and yet itself constitutes a language, a method for understanding and controlling the physical which in this case is also the self.” What story is embedded in movement? The path my body travels is brand new. What does that scribe in my brain? What emotion or thoughts get wired into the movement? Is mid-life a time of weary competence? Where we mostly retrace spirals—efficient and effortless?

He mimes the movement without the bar.

Here goes.

Collecting momentum from my calves, I straighten my legs as I push the bar up.

As it passes my face, and my arms shoot upward, Liam shouts, “Smash your forehead through a plate of glass!”—a cue around follow-through.

The bar is nearly over my head now.

“That’s it! Lock out your elbows!”

With arms spread wide, the finish is like a capital Y.

My body spells victory.

Liam grins. He’s traced the lift in front of me and stands in the same victorious position.

It’s thrilling. I’m exhilarated as the bar lands back against my chest. Is it the novelty? Am I learning a craft? I didn’t know I needed an antidote to my McSlumpy workday in a chair and evenings curled like a mollusk on my couch after my run. I didn’t know I could punch through a ceiling. There’s something badass about it. Explosive. This is Wonder Woman plus tattoos.

Movement is a language. In the push press, my body learns to write a new word. CrossFit carries vocabulary, like any physical practice—ballet or tai chi or yoga. I drive home from the gym, still sticky with August heat, but this time, feeling unstoppable. I crank the stereo and resist gunning the accelerator. I wonder if my delight is a descendent of infancy. The wild pride of jetting around on chubby forearms or tottering in white baby boots toward freedom.

***

When I hike with my mom on Sunday following CrossFit, I find a giant branch in the brush and make her stop and watch me. I try to show off my new maneuver. I want to celebrate. To practice the “push press.” I don’t remember her response; athletic feats aren’t where our shared interests rest. Her response to formal exercise is the old joke, “I sit down until the urge goes away.” My mom moves over the landscape slowly, with a camera, her painterly vision. Delighted by light through the lobes of leaves, she grabs my arm, “Laura, look at that!”

My urge, when I see a field or a stretch of beach or wood chip path, is to run—to move over any landscape. My steam engine chest and my low glancing stride. Is it my dad’s DNA enacted in me? He was a distance runner, our gaits were alike, now I wonder about our shared restlessness and joy in intense exercise.

How old is the joy of sensation? All my embodied memory. Steam collects and wets my cheeks when my highchair is parked near the stove. The gritty pudding of wet sand between my sinking toes. The weightless flight of a teeter-totter. The hot static and whiplash of a curly playground slide. Hours with the weight of a soccer ball against my foot. My fingertips against guitar frets. The pleasure is embedded and repeated. Embedded and repeated.

***

In his fifties, with Parkinson’s disease, Muhammad Ali relished his youthful prowess, as David Remnick described in a 1998 article in the New Yorker:

“Ali was smiling now as his younger self, Cassius Clay, flicked a nasty left jab into Liston’s brow.

‘You watchin’ this?’ he said. ‘So-o-o fast! So-o-o pretty!’

‘I was twenty… twenty what? Twenty-two. Now I’m fifty-four. Fifty-four.’ He said nothing for a minute or so. Then he said, ‘Time flies. Flies. Flies. It flies away.’”

Maybe my endeavours are a hedge against madness. Goals and projects are a tether in the face of life’s randomness, fragility, and unanswered questions. The vast space a brain can’t contemplate. I believe that in the moment of death and afterward, the scale of life will feel infinitesimally small. That I’ll see myself from above, like an ant pillaging at a picnic, linear and obtuse in my pursuits, attending to the wrong things.

In the ten years since CrossFit, I still chase my limits. My wisdom can still be outmatched by the thrill of dopamine and endorphins. There’s joy on muddy escarpment scampers, in lazy flutter kicks through a chilled lake, on my beater bike at sunrise and trying to left-hand it with a ping pong paddle. My body as the foot soldier to my ambition. My body as geography. The location, battleground, playing field where orders are executed. My body as the location for furious attempts to touch the sun. How many years will I be gifted this luxury? I’m forever collecting feathers and glue, forever tracing the outline for paper wings.