A Year Pumping Iron

About a year ago today, I started lifting weights.

Now it’s okay to react. I know what you’re gonna say. You’re gonna go all “So pumping iron huh? You wanna look all svelte and wear shirts in children’s sizes, eh? You’re gonna eat high protein mulch that’d shame Czechoslovakian prison food to get rock hard abs that really don’t do anything regular abs can’t do, except they’re harder huh? Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

To that, let me say, in my sweetest tone:

Listen, cretin, and listen good. Getting in shape has nothing to do with gym. If you have a functioning brain any size larger than a pea, you’d know that getting in shape has very little to do with what you lift or how fast you jog. Thanks to dedicated research and heavy doses of pot, leading experts today are closing in on the reason our collective pant sizes have gone up an average of 19 inches.

Mucus.

Well, okay, not just mucus, other people’s mucus. In National Geographic’s fat plague, avante-garde obesity experts (yes, apparently, there actually are obesity experts) study the human adenovirus, a disease that, among other things, “turns pre-fat cells into full-fledged fat cells.” To demonstrate this, they show an MTV of dancers posing as pre-fat cells, and more dancers posing as the adenovirus. After the adenovirus uses cha-cha to charm the helpless pre-fat cell, people get fat.

Now, let me just say, that was the best scientific venture ever. I think all studies should have MTVs incorporating scientific thought seamlessly. If the next study on Alzheimer’s doesn’t feature helical protein filaments in our nerve cells doing the tango, we all lose out.

But the point is, the adenovirus, transferred through snot, makes people fat. No amount of gym or protein food that tastes like paper towel goo can help you.

So now people use gym to relax. Hell, they use it to meditate. Just ask people over at the rocket-science treadmill nearest you. In case you haven’t heard of this rocket-science treadmill, these are amazing inventions that, as you exercise, track your heart rate, pulse, internal hemorrhaging, etc. They have TVs connected to them, and have configurable inclines that go from flat to Mayon to Everest.

Fans of the relaxation school of thought are societal marvels. They stretch, get ready for action, plop onto these machines, then, without warning, BAM! They jog at the pace of earthworms racing. If you’ve seen sprouts grow faster, they must be pretty well-bred sprouts.

But the point is, the TV and the walking action whoops garden-walking ass, because one, simulated walking is always more productive than actual walking, and two, you can laugh at gymmers who want to warm up before lifting weights.

Sadly, though, I tried enlisting for a relaxing school but the simulated waiting list killed my chances. Instead, I do gym for entirely different reasons.

I’m crazy.

That’s not an expression. I have an actual mental illness, called muscle dysmorphia, otherwise known as bigorexia. Harrison Pope, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical Institute, wanted to remind gymmers that they’re a bunch of loons, so he wrote a 10,234 page document read by two people about this strangely unalarming mental disease.

So as I get nostalgic about the full year I’ve been lifting weights, and the many, many technological and scientific breakthroughs in the field of medicine and human kinetics, like rocket-science treadmills, insane-gymmer syndrome and snot-based fat growth, I can’t help but smile, get all teary-eyed, and wonder what our scientists must be smoking.

Whatever it is, I want some.