Flashback to 1997 – My First Experience in a Weight Room

I was cleaning up some files on our cloud server and found a folder labeled “Unpublished Articles.”  Inside I found this written in 2014, and I thought it was too good not to share to remind you that everyone had their first time in the gym, and some go better than others. – Zach

When I was a kid I was always very much easy to overlook – decently smart, small, scrawny, not very good at sports.  I played baseball up until 8^th grade but wasn’t very good at it – the only reason I was a starter was because I was from a small town with limited resources and it was tough to fill out a team as it was.  You know you’re not great when you spend most of your time in right field – nobody hits to right field unless you’re a left-handed hitter, and when I was playing maybe 1 out of 50 kids were left-handed.  So you’re just sort of there as a placeholder to make sure enough players are on the field for the game to proceed.  Not a very good hitter, either – I batted in the middle or bottom of the lineup and was probably good for a hit every 5 or 6 at-bats.  I gave up when I got to high school because I knew that at that point I wasn’t going anywhere with it and it just sort of seemed like a waste of time.

My less than exceptional skill and genetics came out full stop very early in my freshman year of high school.  At that time I was 5’7”, 108lbs if I was lucky.  Tragically, this was also the era of JNCO jeans and oversized t-shirts, so I was this short, string-bean looking kid wearing elephant pants with 32” ankle openings and an XXL FUBU jersey – let that visual sink in for a little while before you proceed to the next sentence.

Got it? Great.  Now take that 108lb weiner and drop him in the school weight room on the first day of gym class.  Apparently the gym teachers at my high school were named Hanz and Franz because they decided that this would be an appropriate time to take a bunch of barely pubescent almost-high-schoolers and do a bench press test.

It must have been my lucky day, because at my weight, I was “only” required to bench press 95lbs eight times.  Never mind that at this point in my life the closest I had ever gotten to an actual weight bench was the time I watched Chuck Norris demonstrate the Total Gym on TV… this was happening.

I watched a couple of other kids go before me, and while they struggled, they all at least did it a couple of times.  They may have flopped around like a seabass on methamphetamines, but nobody died.  I was fully prepared to set the “Number of Days Without an Accident” box back to 0.  After a liftoff from “somebody” (I genuinely have no idea who it was anymore, other than that they said the word “yup” like twenty times first), I held the bar out over my chest.

What happened next was probably similar to when somebody bungee jumps with a cord that’s just a couple of feet too long, but they have no idea.  The bar dropped to my chest/sternum/bony parts just as fast, and probably damaged just as many internal organs.  I think I made some sort of cry for help that sounded like if somebody was trying to whistle while in the middle of a hotdog eating competition before the aforementioned “somebody” lifted the bar off of my now slightly concave torso.

The look of disappointment that I received from one of the gym teachers would not have been more severe had he just found me rehearsing dance moves for Justin Beiber’s World Tour (and also had the Beibs not been like a fetus when this happened), and he halfheartedly directed me over to the next bench… the “girl’s bench.”

The girl’s bench was just a bench with an empty 45lb bar on it, where I saw a couple of girls go through a couple of motions that you could sort of call a bench press, but with all of the detached indifference you would expect from a bunch of 14-year-old girls in gym class.

No problem, my stupid brain thought, because I was too young to realize that not every attempt at redemption looks like Ralph Macchio standing on one leg and sounds like a wailing guitar solo.  I laid down, assumed “the position,” and lifted the bar off the hooks all by myself… where I was then promptly stapled to the bench like a “Drummer Wanted” poster is stapled to a telephone pole.

At that point, I was instructed to just “go stretch,” which is like gym teacher lingo for “thank God you’re not my kid.” 

After that first experience with weight training, which went over about as well as the United States storming the beaches of Normandy, I began to lift on a regular basis.  Not well, mind you, but at least it was regular.  I think I gained 5lbs the first couple of months, which was enough to keep me from going airborne every time somebody turned on a desk fan.

So when you see me and think “that guy’s always been able to do this,” instead think, “that guy is lucky he wasn’t placed in a gym locker and forced to eat the combination for sustenance.”

Also, make sure you picture me in really big pants.