Power lifting made me a better writer

One of the only ways I can find calm is by risking injury. I began learning this when, years ago, I tried rock-climbing. Bouldering, that is, which doesn’t involve rope and harnesses. Scaling 17-foot walls with no backup rope, balancing all my weight on a toe and two fingers, knowing that if I fall badly I might break a bone or worse—I hadn’t known my otherwise anxious, restless mind could get this quiet from anything so relatively available as a gym sport.

For several years, I climbed as often as I could. But that proximity to physical harm did come, at times, with real injury. I racked up emergency-room and urgent-care trips. During one of those hospital visits, as I cried from pain, a doctor said he saw more patients from my San Francisco bouldering gym than from any other location. I get stubborn, though, about what I love. It required a third sprained ankle, along with months of crutches, for me to admit I might have to chase the quiet I craved through a different activity. Still, I didn’t know what until a friend suggested I try out what has become a lasting beloved, power-lifting.

Here’s the moment when I first suspected I might fall in love: I was told I shouldn’t start lifting without an expert’s advice. Unless I knew how to maintain the right form, it would be easy for me to get hurt. Part of what divides power-lifting from other, less potentially hazardous kinds of strength-training is the large mass involved. In the course of most workout sessions, while mixing up the three classic power-lifting moves—the dead-lift, bench press, and back squat—I approach the maximal weight I’m able to pick up and move around.

Accordingly, the threat of injury flits close. Every time I lift a barbell, I’m incapable of thinking beyond what my body is doing. How’s my core—did I square my scapulas—how’s my grip—are my shoulders rounding—what about my back—use my legs—push my feet into the ground. Core, grip, shoulders, back, legs, feet, I tell myself, time and again, circling around a ritual that seems to expand with each reprise. The ritual defines a charmed ring, an idyll, in which I have not a thing to do but inhabit a body, this bundle of muscle and skin going so far past what I thought to be its limits.

But how those limits change. And how good it feels, as the news blares its daily crises, to keep getting stronger. Lifting aside, I tend to be fretful, alive to dangers. I prepare for emergencies; I have go-bags packed. When a tsunami warning hit San Francisco last month, I knew which neighborhoods might be in peril. Frantic with knowledge, I texted friends, asking if they were close to shore. Once, I took a first-responder class. Much of it was useful; toward the end, as we practiced what we’d do in case of a fire, rehearsing dragging unconscious bodies out of a building, I left early. I didn’t want to waste the instructors’ time, there being so little dragging I could do. Now, I can do more.

It’s startling, too, how quickly muscles can rise, my body altering as if birthing a new self. Also exhilarating is the experience of hitting a personal record: dead-lifting five more pounds than I did the last time, and another five, then finding I’m at fifteen. I measure changes against myself. Starting out, I could dead-lift half of my own weight, then three quarters. Then all of my weight, and then more. Crucially, each time I hit a personal record, nothing can negate the new triumph. It happened; it’s a fact, established. Before long, I’ll push a little higher.

Such thrills are difficult to obtain in the rest of my life, much of which is dictated by writing. I am, to date, a slow writer—my debut novel took ten years. My second, nine. There was overlap between those years, but still. Upon finishing a book draft, I feel no sense of accomplishment: there are so many more to go. Meanwhile, as is true for any number of artists, my well-being is predicated on that of my writing. The first depends on the second. I think sometimes of what Honoré de Balzac said when he ran into his writer friends at the end of a day. He didn’t inquire how they were doing; instead, he asked if they’d worked well that day, since, if they said yes, it necessarily followed that his friends were thriving.

It’s luck, I know, to be this obsessed with my work, to live so fascinated; I also long for the periodic break, a chance to spend intervals away from the grip writing has on my attention. Lifting, by not giving me the space to think about writing, provides these brief, clarifying lulls. In the absence of such respites, I’m not sure how I’d have finished my most recent novel, Exhibit. The writing of that novel, which centers women’s sexuality, came with sometimes hours-long panic attacks, fits of terror and shame about what I felt compelled to put on the page. Few activities will interrupt a panic attack, but power-lifting can. Inside the magic circle, iron plates clanging on the barbell, I recall that I’m already doing more than I used to believe I could. I imagine getting stronger with each set, that eventual self leading me out of the present toward the person I’m trying to be.

This piece originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar USA

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