What I talk about when I talk about lifting

Barbells as craft

Once every few years, I re-listen to Haruki Murakami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), a book that’s only nominally about his addiction to marathon running. Really, it’s about the physical and spiritual experience of undertaking projects that require sustained efforts over long periods — training for and running long races; writing long novels.

Murakami started running in his 30s, after he had published two short novels, Hear the Wind Sing (1979) and Pinball 1973 (1980). He wrote those books while managing a jazz bar in Tokyo; he was working long hours, living nocturnally, smoking 60 cigarettes a day. Those early novels took on the shape of the space he could give them in his life: they were intuitively structured, small, curious objects. But in working on his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), Murakami decided that he wanted to write longer, more densely plotted books. To do so, he felt he needed not just inspiration, but also endurance. He needed to turn his writing from habit into labor. In pursuit of quiet, health, and stamina, he moved out of Tokyo to Chiba Prefecture, quit smoking, and started running.

The first time I encountered this memoir, in my early 20s, I had just barely learned to make myself like running. I remember listening to the audiobook¹ on long commutes up and down I-280 in California. More than once, while driving from San Francisco to the South Bay for a Saturday meeting, I pulled off the highway to squeeze in a quick jog along the trails at Half Moon Bay, arriving at work sweaty and salty.

Half Moon Bay, c. 2014

All that running started to give me knee pain, though. When a guy I was dating suggested I go to the 24 Hour Fitness with him to learn how to lift or at least cross-train, I was skeptical. It seemed suitably writerly to go on romantic runs along the water. It seemed embarrassing — normie — to go to an actual gym and touch weights.² Still, I went. My first night at the gym was humiliating. I couldn’t move the 45 pound barbell.³ I couldn’t hold a squat without collapsing dangerously at the bottom. I could only hang off a pull-up bar for a few seconds. But I kept going, and within a few months, lifting had won me over. Running had always felt like a slow shedding to me — I fell away as I ran longer. At best, meditative. At worst, eating disordery.⁴ When I was lifting, by contrast, I needed more of me. Not less.

People tend to be surprised when they learn that I lift, which should be sort of insulting but, hey. I’m not visibly jacked. I can’t move a weight that would stun you. I don’t compete in powerlifting or bodybuilding competitions. (My go-to line when the matter comes up is that I am surprisingly strong for a writer of my size.) I am an unremarkable human in the gym. I show up four or five times a week, pick up some moderately heavy objects, put them down again, go home. And yet this activity, which has been the most consistent⁵ part of my life other than writing and reading over the past decade, is part of my “process” in a manner that I don’t often discuss.