Lift: Fitness Culture, from Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors

249 Pages·2016·1.83 MB·English

by  Daniel Kunitz

DEDICATION
FOR JENN
EPIGRAPH
Whoever goes in search of humans will find acrobats.
PETER SLOTERDIJK
CONTENTS
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
INTODUCTION Into the New Frontier
CHAPTER 1 The Inner Statue
CHAPTER 2 But Is It Good for You?
CHAPTER 3 Feeling, Breathing, Going to War
CHAPTER 4 Bodyweight Politics
CHAPTER 5 Hercules and the Athletic Renaissance
CHAPTER 6 Training for the Mirror
CHAPTER 7 Acrobats and Beefcake
CHAPTER 8 The Tyranny of the Wheel
CHAPTER 9 From Women’s Work to the Women’s Movement
CHAPTER 10 Practicing at Life
Acknowledgments
General Notes on Sources
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
I
t is the young who most reliably bring news of the future. Today’s flash comes
from my cousin Juliet, who has just entered the eighth grade. I don’t know her
well, or any other girls her age, but to my untutored eye she seems a bit taller
than average, thin though not skinny, with shoulder-length brown hair. She is
girlish, even ladylike, and not particularly known in our family as big on sports.
This makes it all the more astonishing when, while sitting around a pool with
some other cousins of a similar age, Juliet announces that she has joined the
women’s weightlifting team at her school.
That is news—not so much of Juliet but of all womankind. When else in
human history but now could her casual statement be possible, or even
imaginable? Since when have women been encouraged to lift heavy weights, to
form a team of weightlifters?
Her announcement does not, however, faze the boys she’s speaking with. All
within a few years of her, not one finds it odd or surprising when Juliet
nonchalantly explains that she and a friend joined the team “because we wanted
to start a new sport that would make us stronger.”
A
generation earlier, when I was her age—and, what’s more, for every
generation preceding hers down to the beginning of time—a girl wanting to get
stronger would have provoked snorts of disapproval, mockery, often disgust.
Young women were not supposed to want muscles; were not to bother with
being strong: such desires were deemed unfeminine. And for a girl entering her
self-conscious teens, like Juliet, it would have been especially unlikely. There
might have been some boys in my junior high school who wished to pump
themselves up into musclemen like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester
Stallone’s Rambo, but as far as I recall we had no weight room. And while the
majority of girls at my school may have hoped to get as skinny as Jane Fonda in
one of her workout videos, they were far more likely to do it with cigarettes,
Diet Coke, and fasting than with aerobics. Besides, lifting was considered
dangerous for kids that age—just one of the many things that could supposedly
“stunt your growth.”
But in the autumn of 2013, the male cousins around the pool—reedy, pale,
and more taken with coding than athletics—find it perfectly normal for a girl to
do strength sports, as does the girl herself. Without realizing it, these kids are
denizens of a world that has begun reconceiving the very idea of fitness; they
inhabit a New Frontier that a handful of adventurers began exploring about
fifteen years ago, just before the turn of the millennium. And two of the key
features of this territory that these adventurers have inadvertently pointed out are
the prominence of women and the acceptance of strength training.
G
irls hoisting heavy weights above their heads; women with muscles; girls
who are stronger than many boys: these are some of the last remaining female
cultural taboos. They persist in the East as well as in the West. Yet these taboos
are being rapidly broken down.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sport Juliet adopted, though it is
still largely unknown by the American public. In Europe and Asia, where it is a
hugely popular, teenage boys and girls will know exactly what is meant by the
word weightlifting. It is emphatically not bodybuilding, which is what comes to
most of our minds when we hear the clank of iron; it does not entail the most
common lift seen in gyms, the bench press; nor does it have anything to do with
hoisting enormous stones or pulling airliners with your teeth. Weightlifting
consists of the two barbell events included in the Olympic Games (and because
of this it is also known as Olympic lifting): the snatch and the clean-and-jerk.
The clean-and-jerk combines two basic and entirely common human
movements: the clean, in which you pull a weighted bar from the floor to your
shoulders; and the jerk, which powers the bar from the shoulders to a locked-arm
position over your head. The snatch is more complex: with a very wide grip on
the weighted bar, you heave it in one swift motion from the ground to overhead.
While the Oly lifts, as they are known, might sound brutish and scary to the
uninitiated, they are in fact as graceful as dance, demanding agility, flexibility,
and speed as much as strength. They are also highly technical, requiring years of
practice even to approach competence. Their subtlety adds to the obsessional
nature of the lifts. I envied Juliet for getting such an early start, and after I told
them about her, so did the women with whom I train.
I
didn’t try the Olympic lifts until my thirties, and like many people in recent
years, my introduction came through CrossFit. During high school and college I
did no systematic exercise, and in fact I don’t recall anyone ever suggesting that
doing so might be beneficial. I participated in no team sports in school, either. I
was an avid skier, over the fifteen-odd days a year that skiing was possible for a
kid growing up in suburban Maryland. And on occasion I’d play tennis, go
hiking, or ride my bicycle—all of which I continued to do after college, when I
moved to New York and began working as an editor at The Paris Review, a
literary magazine that George Plimpton had founded with several others in 1953.
It was at The Paris Review that I became alienated from my physical
existence, and where we became reacquainted. At our worst, my cohorts and I at
the magazine emulated the wasted waif aesthetic of the time, the nineties, and
gave no thought to improving or maintaining ourselves physically. We thought
of ourselves as living the life of the mind. At our best, we emulated George,
who, I now see, was an exemplar of a mid-twentieth-century ideal of vigorous
masculinity. He was athletic enough for journalistic stunts like playing
quarterback for the Detroit Lions, boxing against Archie Moore, standing in as
goalie in a hockey game, and taking a few turns on a circus trapeze, all of which
he recounted in brilliantly hilarious books. His was an ethos of play—of
recreation rather than training. And so he maintained a strong tennis game well
into his sixties; he liked bird watching; he never took a taxi or the subway (let
alone drove a car) when he could bike instead. But running or lifting weights,
anything that might unduly spike the heart rate or tax the muscles, was out of the
question: they would have interfered with the nightly revelry. The most
charming of men, George was world-famous as a host. Planeloads of people flew
in from every part of the globe for the parties he threw several times a week.
And when George wasn’t hosting, we—the handful of us, all in our twenties,
who worked at The Paris Review—followed him like a column of ducklings out
into the Manhattan night, to book parties, benefit galas, random birthday parties,
intimate soirees, movie premieres, or just to a bar to get sloshed. To a kid from
the suburbs, and even to the metropolitan sophisticates among us, who had gone
from Park Avenue to Harvard before returning to the city, our life was
impossibly glamorous and exciting. We spent our nights seeded among the beau
monde of famous writers, actors, TV personalities, politicians, and socialites.
And with them we poured gallons of scotch down our gullets; we snorted drugs;
we smoked cigarettes and pot. George, however, was not just some empty bon
vivant. In fact, he had an ingrained Protestant work ethic: no matter how deep
into the night he dove, he always surfaced on cue, waking each morning to put in
a full day of writing and editing.
I was less resilient.
For a period, George hosted weekly Friday night tennis matches at one of the
clubs he belonged to. Then pushing seventy, he bounced through games with
vim, while I, then in my late twenties, was dismayed at how easily winded I
became, playing doubles no less, a game I’d always thought of as being for the
geriatric set. By then a flight of stairs would leave me bent over with a tubercular
wheeze; I felt incapable of carrying around much more than a gin and tonic. The
reason for my physical degeneration was that for the previous decade I’d lived
almost entirely in my head: writing, reading, editing, looking at art, thinking. But
also smoking a pack or more a day, drinking every night, and consuming way
too many powdered drugs. My body had become a trash depot. Healthy eating
meant a burger from the deli rather than McDonald’s, or perhaps some green
peppers on my pizza. Like many people at that invulnerable age, I gave almost
no thought to my body. Or worse, I had a romantic view of my sorry physical
state: I was an artist, a bohemian; dissipation came with the role.
F
or someone so enthralled with thought, I am in retrospect puzzled by my
failure to reflect on the basic assumption on which my existence was based—
that the mind and body sleep in separate bedrooms, leading their own lives. I
might have considered that the brain is part of the body, that the two are in fact
one: if you’re treating yourself like a sewer, you’re bathing your brain in shit.
I’ve since come to understand that the old canard about choosing between the
life of the body and the life of the mind (a bastardized version of the ancient and
more valid distinction between the via activa and the via contemplativa, the
active, political life versus the contemplative way) sets up a false distinction. It’s
a bias based on the assumption that energy expended physically must be
deducted from our mental account. Contrary to what I believed in high school,
jocks need not be stupid, while eggheads, to the extent that they deny their
physical lives, are fools.
In the New York literary world of the nineties, almost everyone—though not
George—remained still gleefully stuck in that high school mentality. We thought
physical culture was an oxymoron (with the emphasis on moron—we preferred
our oxy with contin). That’s not to say we were inactive: we had endlessly
rechargeable batteries when it came to carousing. George had an extraordinary
constitution—up to a point. When his lifestyle finally exacted a toll on his
health, it was steep: he died at the comparatively young age of seventy-six. But it
certainly wasn’t only George or my own slide into dissipation that prompted me
to consider a change. When the anchorman Peter Jennings, who was a close
friend of George and someone in whose excellent company I spent a fair amount
of time, was diagnosed with cancer, I had before me the example of an athletic
guy felled by cigarettes. And Jennings represented not only New York to me, but
also mountain life: he was a strong skier. Several times each year I flew out to
Utah and tried to keep up with a posse of hard-core snow addicts, but now a day
on the slopes crippled me, battering my legs into useless appendages and
burning through what lung tissue I had left.
Eventually my wider circle of friends, people who had taken heroin chic all
too literally, began to succumb to their bad habits. Several close friends died of
overdoses; others were carted off to rehab. Each departure left a ghostly residue
of questions and bewilderment. Perhaps, rather than living the life of the mind as
I had believed, I was in actuality living a mindlessly self-destructive physical
existence.
One morning, while trying to manage the trick of power vomiting into a
toilet without moving so much as a millimeter, because every twitch was like a
hammer striking the gong of my migraine, sending ripples of pain through my
limbs and eyeballs, it dawned on me that the state of your body isn’t something
you either choose to care about or leave be, for your body never just is—it is
always either decaying or getting stronger. Not choosing is still a choice.
A
t the time, you were expected to hit forty like a car in neutral at the top of a
long hill with a progressively steeper grade: at first the decline is a gentle roll,
but it quickly picks up speed as it seeks its nadir. This was the assumption about
aging that obtained in my youth and into my adulthood; it is an assumption that
still exists for many of us today. You will drive up mountains instead of hiking
them; doubles will replace singles tennis; you will walk instead of run; you will
gain fat around your middle; you will take up golf. Or bridge.
Soon after turning thirty, when the deaths of my peers and others in my
circle had accumulated like the smoker’s phlegm in my lungs, I decided I needed
to reverse course, to start running up the down escalator. It occurred to me that
I’d never heard of anyone battling the progressive decay of the flesh with a
progressive pushback, gradually doing more exercise each year, dialing in
nutrition a little more precisely. The idea was that drastic life changes, like crash
diets, rarely stick—I already knew that from my negative experience with habits.
I knew how easy it was to fall into bad ones, I knew that trying to break them too
swiftly was a recipe for failure, and I knew that good ones needed to be knit