Return to Form

I started going to the gym again. When I was a kid, I thought of myself as an indoor person. Most of my free time was spent playing video games and occasionally reading books, and most of my exercise came from gym class and seasonal soccer teams.

I’d been somewhat curious about the gym going back to high school, when I unexpectedly befriended some football players. But aside from a few false-starts, it remained something out of reach, too intimidating to enter in on my own, but seeing no way into a group.

I took up running when I started living alone during college. Partly this was from the influence of Murakami Haruki, a noted runner, but beyond that, I think I just wanted to move my body again. I hadn’t realized how important it was, how much these minimal exercises from my childhood had meant until I was suddenly not forced to do them. I felt stagnant, both literally and metaphorically, and soon when I skipped running for a few days for any reason, I found myself itching to get back out there.

What I needed was balance.

A little while after a friend got into powerlifting, and together we went to the gym once or twice, but still I remained on the outside. It wasn’t until my partner got me a gym membership as a present that I fell into the gym for real. I think of that time as my “training arc.” I had started a six-month contract job, and for those six months, I did little besides write, go to work, and three nights a week, go to the gym and train.

I’m a tall guy, but I’ve always been sort of a beansprout. Suddenly, I was trying to eat as much as possible, tracking all my meals, and watching the numbers I lifted at the gym get progressively higher. A couple of months in, I bumped into an old coworker, who remarked I’d “gotten big”: a compliment as good as any for a gym-goer.

But all good things come to an end. My gift membership expired, and so did my contract job, and with it any chance I could keep going on my own. I turned back to what I had done before: running, calisthenics, and occasional kettlebell workouts. With this I made do, but it wasn't the same. Even so, it was probably time for a break; I'd been doing the same thing for six months straight, which is usually when I start to get a bit stir-crazy (I also reached the end of a basic linear progression, and the idea of more complicated training didn't exactly appeal.)

Over the past two years, I'd yearned to get back into the gym, but it wasn't until moving, and the steadiness of a full-time job, that I've been able to find my way back in. In fact, it was one of the mundane things I was looking most forward to, and became something of a refrain for myself: "when I find a job, I'm going to get a gym membership again."

It might seem like being freelance, having maximum free time, made working out easier, but it wasn't the case for me. I was as consistent as I could be, but without the income to sustain a gym membership, and the ever-changing flux of work, it was easy to get out of sync. Similarly, when I was working tough, bad jobs, I was too spent to find the energy for myself; be that working out, writing, or making photography.

What I needed was balance. The consistency of income, the space to do what I want. So far, in this new rhythm, I think I've found the happy medium.

As I've started to fall back into the rhythm of gym-going, all of that initial intimidation is gone. I'm just doing what I know, and three mornings a week, I get up and go find a squat rack, doing my workout and leaving within 40 minutes. I'm a little surprised with which the ease my body has taken to it again. The only thing I'm trying to remember is doing the plate math to make sure I'm lifting according to my schedule—everything else is intuitive. I know what exercises I want to do, and how to do them. I know the form needed to accomplish this, and can feel when something is too difficult or too easy. The numbers aren't anywhere near where they were at my peak, but they're getting back up there, one session at a time.

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