Musclebound

Versions of this personal essay about strength training – which I wrote shortly after I began working on Strong Women Stay Young – appeared in Woman's Day and in Barnard Magazine.

I was walking toward the ATM at my bank when something snapped inside my right knee. Pain splattered the back of my leg, streaking down the calf. I staggered to a chair in the mortgage department. For nearly an hour I sat, letting the pain subside, waving away loan officers who wanted to call an ambulance or refinance my house.

As I waited, an old woman entered the bank, pushing a walker. She was shrunken and bent over. Normally, her halting progress from door to teller would have triggered compassion, or perhaps the chilling fear that I was headed for similar disability. Instead, I stared enviously: she had something to lean on.

The next day my doctor gave me an x-ray and a diagnosis: osteoarthritis. The cartilage in my right knee had worn away, so bone crushed into bone with every step. It's a common problem, he explained, shared by over 20 million Americans.

“What's the treatment?” I asked.

“Nothing for now,” he said. “When it gets worse, we'll talk about an artificial knee.”

“But it hurts!” I said, indignant at being dismissed without a fix.

He nodded sympathetically. “Take a painkiller. Use a cane. Lose weight. And do some exercises to strengthen your legs.”

Until then I'd been happily untroubled by aging. I didn't agonize over the changes produced by half a century of gravity, or the small signs of gradual decline, like breathlessness on stairs. I could laugh at my teenage son's age jokes: “Hey, Ma! Weren't you a waitress at the Last Supper?” But now my parachute had ripped and I was plunging too fast.

As a health writer, I'd piously recommended physical activity to others. But like most Americans, I'd taken the call to fitness sitting down. To pick up a phone message, I didn't walk downstairs to the answering machine; I dialed from my fax line. Exercise held no appeal for me. When I drove past the local women's gym, whose picture windows overlook the street, I laughed at the joggers bobbing on treadmills like gerbils in a cage.

By coincidence, I'd just started collaborating on a how-to book about strength training, Strong Women Stay Young, with Miriam Nelson of Tufts University. Weight lifting sounded like tolerable exercise, even to me. I wouldn't have to lie on the floor, move rapidly, or sweat. Raising a dumbbell demanded only stubbornness, not grace or talent. And I'm plenty stubborn. I tried it.

When you're strength training at the right intensity, the first few lifts feel easy. Then, mysteriously, the weight seems heavier with each repetition. The eighth lift burns, as lactic acid builds up in the muscles. Then you stop and the discomfort melts into a pleasant glow. When the eighth lift isn't hard any more, that means you've gotten stronger and you graduate to a heavier weight.

After a few weeks, I traded my starter dumbbells - a pair of three-pounders in giddy pink plastic - for serious iron. By the third month, my outgrown fives and eights were replaced by tens and fifteens. I had reached the goals in our book. My knee pain hadn't disappeared, but it rarely required painkillers.

Two years later, I'm watching my teenager, home from college, flexing before the hall mirror. I understand his fascination because I've done the same thing in front of the same mirror. I lack what body builders call “definition” – my new muscles don't show. But they can be felt, like little Brazil nuts under billows of whipped cream. I am ridiculously proud of them.

At medical checkups I present my quadriceps to the doctor and demand: “Check out those muscles!” I escort my indulgent husband on a daily grand tour, and barely contain myself from doing the same with close friends, casual acquaintances, the washing machine repairman. On airplanes, I hoist my suitcase into the overhead rack, ostentatiously spurning help from startled young men. “I can do it!” I say loudly. “I lift weights.”

Emboldened by my new strength, I've joined that gym with the picture windows. I'm one of the oldest women there, but also one of the strongest. I know this because I furtively check weight settings on the machines and compare.

My son, who'd been away at school, had missed my metamorphosis. “My legs are good,” he says, scrutinizing his reflection. “But I need something for my upper body.”

“Try my program.”

“That's for little old ladies,” he says, astonished and scornful.

I bring him the ten-pound dumbbell I use for the triceps exercise. The triceps is a little muscle in the back of the upper arm, the one that aches when you change a ceiling light bulb. It's not worked very often, so it's generally underdeveloped. I know that. My son doesn't. I demonstrate the move. He lifts the dumbbell over his head.

“Easy,” he says.

“You have to do it eight times,” I tell him.

By the fourth lift his face shows a gratifying mix of surprise and pain. He struggles; his arm wobbles. But he finishes the set. There is no more talk of little old ladies.

The treadmill at my gym has a built-in fitness test. In the beginning, I barely managed five minutes on the treadmill and scored “Below Average.” Now I walk for thirty minutes, bobbing up and down in the picture window. The machine rates me “Above Average.” Unexpectedly, I've found joy in this journey, from my strength and also from the triumph of physical improvement. I thought I had reached an age at which all travel - coasting, sliding, falling - headed downhill. Instead I'm ascending, stubborn in my defiance of gravity and time.

© 2001, Sarah Wernick
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