The desire to work out in the garage with weights, mostly kettlebells for the last two decades, has not abated as I close in on my sixty-fifth birthday. There is no voice inside me saying, “Someday you will hang up your leather workout gloves.” I embrace the workout grind with undying enthusiasm. I remember reading a bodybuilding magazine in the 70s and coming across a quote from a champion bodybuilder: “I’m going to keep training as long as God allows me to breathe.” I’m on the same page. Working out is not an option. It’s as essential as breathing.
I have to assume that since my first workout in 1974, I’ve been getting a dopamine fix from these training sessions, resulting in stress relief. I have to assume working out is my way of managing anxiety and depression. I have to assume my workouts are addictive in their own right. If I miss a workout, I feel so ungrounded that I become unbearable to myself and others. This makes vacations a challenge. What’s supposed to be a time of stress relief becomes a stress bomb.
Working out for an hour a day is not just about carving out an hour for exercise. It’s about creating an entire routine built around that hour. The feedings, the naps, the piano, the writing, the creative work, and the chores all revolve around the 10 a.m. workout.
So the Happy Place, as people might call it, is not just the garage, where the alchemy of resistance and sweat takes place while a radio tuned to news talk hums in the background. It’s the entire daily routine.
Essential to this routine, after the workout shower and feeding, is the nap. I am so spent after a workout that I demand sixty minutes flat on my back with noise-canceling headphones and one of my favorite podcasts before waking up and having my yogurt bowl. Without that nap, I would not be able to go on for the rest of the day. Something is taken away from me during that morning workout. Something is given back to me after that afternoon nap.
I am more than a hopeless workout guy. I am a hopeless nostalgic workout guy. My heart is not just in the gym. It’s in an era. I’m talking about the 70s, the only bodybuilding age I connect with. In my mind, I am training and eating protein bars with Arnold, Draper, Zane, Mentzer, Oliva, Nubret, and others. I am tanning with the greats on Venice Beach and talking about preacher curls, donkey raises, and hack squats until the orange sun sets in the salmon sky. I am connected with others, the dream of eternal youth, and the Life Force.
Man does not live on bread alone. He lives on myth. I find solace in entering a 70s portal where I am a well-preserved Adonis consuming protein bowls and nutritional shakes. I am reminded of one of John Cheever’s most famous short stories, “The Swimmer.” Aged and washed-up, the main character, Neddy Merrill, decides to swim a chain of swimming pools, which he imagines as the Lucinda River, to travel from a distant house to his home. He imagines himself as a pilgrim embarked on a quest to achieve mythic glory. But all his self-mythologizing distracts him from the brutal fact that his selfish and alcoholic ways have severed his ties with family and friends. He returns to a home that is boarded up and empty.
Looking at this cautionary tale, I must remind myself that workouts are no panacea. My dependence on them and the routines that surround them can make me more self-absorbed than is healthy for me and my family. But in many ways, it’s too late to go back. When I started working out at thirteen and a few years later saw Arnold and other legends in the movie Pumping Iron, I crossed some invisible Rubicon from which there would be no return.
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