TW: body dysmorphia I was never that good at sport.
Poor hand-eye coordination worked with numerous injuries to keep me out of most team sports throughout highschool and archery, while fun, is not the most physically demanding of activities. After I graduated, I thought I was going to change everything. I joined a gym, started a routine, and kept at it for two solid weeks. Then I got glandular fever. Boy oh boy was that bad. I was sleeping 16 hours a day and lost 25 kilos in 3 months. So that’s how I entered my adult life, at 185 cm tall, 59 kg heavy and with some real bad feelings about my body.
Gyms shouldn’t be scary but they kind of are. Especially if you feel like you’re too thin or too fat or too weak. This made returning to the gym much harder for me than going initially. When I finally felt like I was well enough to go back, first I procrastinated and lied to myself for two weeks, then I finally went, getting there just before 6 on a Monday morning because Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson told me that’s what successful people do. I prepared to deadlift, loading up the bar with the same weights I’d been using before I got sick. Obviously no warm up. Clearly only suckers do warm ups. The weight nearly got to my knees before I had to put it down. I looked around, had anyone seen me embarrass myself like that? Failing the first rep of the day, pitiful.
When I got home from that first session I looked in the mirror for a long time. I mentally noted all the things I didn’t like about my body. The too-visible ribs, knobbly elbows, narrow shoulders. I’d finally tried to do something, and it had gone terribly. It was the same feeling as getting a terrible result for a test you’d studied hard for. I just felt frustrated and unmotivated. Every time I saw a depiction of what a gay man should look like, be it at a pride parade, in a movie, or even in porn, they had perfect bodies. That had never felt more out of reach to me. I felt like a failure.
I spent a lot of time just reading about going to the gym, as if it were some proxy for actually attending. Eventually I found a program that I really liked the look of (5/3/1 for beginners). So on a Sunday evening I flipped a coin. Heads, I set an alarm for 5:45 and go the gym in the morning, tails, I don’t. The coin landed on tails so I flipped it two more times until I got heads. Then at 5:50 I flipped it until I got tails and could go back to the bed. I ended up walking into the gym a bit after 9. It was emptier than the first time, which was nice. Figuring out when the gym was emptiest really helped me in the first couple months. I exercised for 45 minutes and then went home. No dropped weights, no dramas.
Slowly but surely things started going better, by the time August of my first year of uni rolled around I finally felt alright on less than 10 hours of sleep. I found a harder program that had me in the gym nearly everyday (nSuns six-day squat program). I could pick up very heavy weights by my previous standards and even ended placing in a local powerlifting competition. But I grew arrogant. I was due to try and set a new squat PR but I had had a spot of food poisoning. “It must be out of my system,” I thought, foolishly. Alas it was not. And with a camera pointed at me, with 200 kilos on my back, I pooed my pants.
