There's no crying in lifting!

On the left: my superego. The right: my id. (And my back.)

I don't think I understood how much lifting means to me until this afternoon's failure. This might seem ridiculously unreflective: I have been lifting for almost 5 years; I read articles and books and watch videos on how to lift better in my down time; I write regularly on a blog about lifting, for goodness sake. But being Strong and Capable and Competent have become much more salient aspects of my identity in the last 6 months, making today's minor failure feel much bigger than I thought it would.

I cried a little.

No, that's a lie. I cried a lot.

So. Background.

I grew up chubby but unencumbered by feelings of self-consciousness, since I assumed there was nothing I could do about it: no one in my family was athletic or slender or even terribly interested in walking around the block. We valued good food and good scholarship over anything physical. That was the way it was and, I assumed, the way it always would be: I put all my stock into being a good student, and told myself it would be vain to worry about the way I looked. My weight bounced up and down through high school and college, occasionally skinny-fat, occasionally depressed-heavy. I had no idea how to control my weight or my eating or my sense of self. Then in late 2006, Marmot taught me how to lift and I found something that I was good at: I could be strong! I could use my Hearty Texan genes and proudly trunk-like thighs to be a strong woman, which felt good in my body as much as it did as a metaphor for living my life. I see a problem, I can fix it; I see a weight on the floor, I can move it. Lifting was a very empowering and enabling activity.

One thing that didn't change, though, was my ability to control my weight. I ate whatever I wanted, lifted with all  my little heart and was confused that my weight kept going up. "Must be muscle!" I'd rationalize, as I bought larger pants. Last summer I trained for and completed the 2010 Chicago Olympic-Distance Triathlon (swimming 1 mile, bicycling 26 miles, running 6 miles) and finished the race at my heaviest weight since I was a stocky 14 year old, 155lbs. This picture was taken a few weeks before the triathlon, and was a bit of a wake-up call to myself when I first saw it: I thought of myself as strong and athletic, but my weight kept creeping up by 5lbs or so a year and, it turns out, it wasn't muscle.

Shortly after that I found out about my gluten intolerance, started doing food tests, yadda yadda--I've written about this shift before. Since the beginning of 2011, I have lost 20lbs by changing my diet. But in the last few months, since March or April, something else has fundamentally shifted: I've started liking the way I look. My body is starting to finally reflect the strong self-image that I've had of myself since I started learning how to be strong all those years ago. Not only that, but I've started to get compliments on my physique: an acquaintence said (amusingly) that she noticed that I've got a "great ass," and a few days ago someone mentioned that my arms are her ideal goal-arms. 

Mine. Mine?! Chubby, dumpy little shy-nerd Pancho?

This shift--my very first compliments, new-found confidence in my body--has happened while I've also made significant improvements in my lifts. For the first time in my life, I know enough about my body and how to feed it and how to move it and challenge it that I can be strong and able and healthy. I feel like I hacked the system: my body's weight and physical ability are no longer mysteries that are out of my control. I finally feel like I know what to do.

So today was leg day at the gym. I was really excited to lift: dead lift has always been my strongest lift and my favorite. We did our warm ups (15 in-the-hole toe-touch squats, 20 spiderman lunges) and loaded our bars for dead lift. Marmot's lifts were, predictably, triumphant:

135lbs x 5

295lbs x 5

330lbs x 1 (5lbs above his previous max)

335lbs x [fail]

335lbs x 1 (10lbs above his previous max)

Mine, however, stayed consistent with my plateau:

65lbs x 5

135lbs x 3

155lbs x 1

175lbs x 1

180lbs x [fail]

At this point I was frustrated: the difference between 175lbs and 180lbs are teensy little insignificant-seeming 2.5lb plates on both sides of the bar, and it was the difference between a confident lift and being completely unable to budge the bar. We unloaded the 2.5s and:

175lbs x [fail]

UGH. I was psyched out. I was distracted and angry at myself. My glasses kept falling off my nose; someone next to me was dropping loud weights; Marmot was watching and cheering, but I could only think about how he kept busting through his goals Kool-Aid Man style, and I couldn't. I was ready to give up and he pushed me to get one last lift in so I wouldn't leave the lift disappointed, so we unloaded the bar even more and:

165lbs x 1

I hurt myself. I was too proud to quit even though I knew I wasn't lifting well. At the beginning of the lift I curved my lower back and, instead of dropping the weight to the floor, I corrected my back mid-lift, powered through the pain, completed my lift and then found myself in stiff, throbbing lower back pain...

...and I stormed off to the corner to cry. I felt humiliated: after all the talk that I do (in, ahem, a public forum no less) about knowing how to lift, about all the pride I have in being strong and capable, that I made such a rookie error and hurt myself bad enough that I had to quit lifting for the day. I felt embarrassed: after all the months of hard work, I can't even budge 5 pounds past this plateau, and I hurt myself on an EASY weight. (Of course, in the moment I couldn't recognize that not 4 months ago I couldn't move 135lbs.) I felt ridiculous, crying in the corner of a competitive power-lifting gym, which just made me angrier and more weepy.

Luckily, Marmot is a patient man and understands my frustration. As he said, anyone who cares about being strong will push their limits, and inevitably that might mean pushing yourself too far. We talked strategy: we're going to keep working on dead lift and squat, but we're going to put more emphasis on lower back strengthening exercises for a while, since that's always my point of failure. I'm going to take today's failure as a much-needed chip off my ego. I know more about what I'm doing, but I'm still a novice and need to accept that my lifts won't always improve exponentially. I'll drop my weights, do higher reps, work on stabilizing muscles and, maybe, start bringing a handkerchief to the gym.