Chapter 8 — The Bachelor from Building 103

Whenever the weight plates went missing at our neighborhood gym, the old folks came looking for me first.

The Bachelor from Building 103

For a while I lived in a small country town. The gym there was tiny, and most of the regulars were grandmothers and grandfathers. I’d loved sports since I was a kid and was pretty good at them, but back then I was working while I sent out résumés and studied for exams on the side, trying to land a better job. The gym got whatever scraps of time were left.

My favorite thing in that gym was the leg press. I’d load it with every plate it could hold, and before long nearly every plate in the building would be hanging off that one machine. One day an old man wandered around looking for plates, and the old man next to him laughed. “The bachelor from Building 103 is here.” I quickly stripped the plates and put them back where they belonged, and everyone had a good laugh.

I was already married at the time. The bachelor title was something I earned in the gym.

A Gym with No Rack

I believed real strength lived in the legs. The trouble was that the gym had no squat rack. A squat starts with the bar sitting in a rack at shoulder height, so with nowhere to set it, I had no way to do one. Putting a bar on a rack and doing a proper squat became my small dream.

So I went hunting for squats I could do without a rack. First came the old-school hack squat: the bar sits on the floor behind your heels, you reach back, grab it, and stand up. The range of motion was too short, and every time I stood up, the bar caught on my backside. I quit after a month.

Next I dug through the internet and found a squat named after some bodybuilder. It turned out to have a name of its own: the Jefferson squat. You straddle the bar, and this time, every time I stood up, the bar got wedged right between my cheeks. Every grandparent in the room turned to stare. I like to think I don’t care what people think. That day I was mortified. I quit after one session.

Then I found the Zercher squat. You hook the bar in the crook of your elbows straight off the floor, hug it to your chest, and stand. At first the inside of my elbows hurt so much that I wrapped a towel around the bar. The towel kept slipping, and more to the point, it looked ridiculous. So I took it off and put up with the pain. Eventually my arms toughened up, and I kept doing that squat for years.

Bold

As soon as that stretch of life ended and I had a little more time, the first thing I did was find a real gym. It had a rack. I’d waited years for this, so I didn’t hesitate. I loaded up a hundred kilos, about 220 pounds, set it on my shoulders, and sat down into it with all the confidence in the world.

About halfway down, I thought: Huh. This isn’t right.

I stood straight back up and racked the bar as if nothing had happened. My first rep of a dream years in the making ended halfway.

What No One Watched

It took less than a month to adjust. It was almost embarrassingly easy. Then something stranger happened. My squat kept climbing and never once stalled. At first I didn’t understand why.

I figured it out later. My legs were already strong. I was the guy who loaded every plate onto the leg press. What’s hard about a squat isn’t the legs. It’s tying the top half of your body to the bottom half. And that awkward squat I’d done for years, hugging a bar in my elbows, had been drilling exactly that, every single day. I never knew.

What the old folks noticed was the leg press with every plate in the gym on it. What actually held me up was that clumsy lift I did in a corner where nobody was watching.

I still think about that gym sometimes. When the plates go missing these days, is someone out there still asking for the bachelor from Building 103?