Giving Up

[Brahms]

I'm 65. I don't want to be the average 65 yo I see every day. Besides, chicks dig me. I Don't wish to disappoint them.

Makes you wonder, though: Do they dig you, or are they just into chess?

[JFord]

I don't quit because then Rippetoe will think I'm a pussy.

[dpinsen]

I used to lift with a young fellow whose goal was to deadlift 2.5x his own body weight. He was a big guy, and 2.5x his body weight came out to well over six hundred pounds. It was a significant challenge even for him.

He trained very hard, and one day while going for a PR he pulled his hamstring off his hip bone. He had to have surgery to repair it, and while he was out recovering, he came down with a MRSA infection.

He was very discouraged. He had to take several months off, maybe a couple of years, but eventually he healed and came back to lifting. I think he eventually made his goal a couple of years later.

Being stubborn helps.

It sounds like a terrible injury and complication, but he was better off than this guy in Australia I read about, who became a quadriplegic from eating chicken ( 'I swallowed a chicken bone and became a quadriplegic': Hospital sued over misdiagnosis ). If you can get paralyzed from eating chicken, might as well get under the bar.

[I_iz_a_fatass]

Why keep going? Because it's hilarious to be able to out-work people half your age by just getting modestly strong by the board's comparison. There's nothing it makes harder, except maybe dealing with the profusion of people who ask you to help them move things. Recovering faster from minor traumas. Because not dying from major trauma is cool. The look on people's faces when you buy eighty pounds of bird seed for your mother in law, the clerk asks if you need help, and you easily toss the bags on your shoulder and tell them, "Nah, I'm good." The shock of fuckwits used to rolling over people running into you on the subway and you don't move from the impact. The joy of eating a lot of meats because they're fuel for your lifting endeavors. Shoveling snow is less work than it is boring.

I don't particularly look forward to the individual sessions - it doesn't matter whether it's volume day, intensity day, or a fuckaround day - but the results of putting in even a minimal effort of ten to twenty hours a month under a bar has such positive effect on the other 700+ hours of the month that the ROI isn't remotely debatable.