Marilia’s Powerlifting Blog

(to Fernando, Caramello and Deni) 

“There’s no sensation to compare with this, suspended animation, a state of bliss” (Pink Floyd, “Learning to Fly”). 

All that happened since my strength failed me yesterday led me to give some serious thought to the motives that drive lifters to lift. Why do I lift? Why did I feel so desperate and lost when my strength failed me? 

I have written extensively about my health conditions and the reasons that brought me to strength training. What I have not written about yet is what lifting means to me. In one word, it means TRANSCENDENCE. 

You may be shocked or you may laugh at what you will read, but do keep in mind I am serious about it: in a perfect lift, as the bar rises, it dissolves as a separate object and we become one. Body and bar. And then all boundaries are dissolved. I become one with the bar, the bar becomes one with the surroundings, the surroundings with everything else and that is transcendence. Suspension of time, space and individuality – just movement and being. For one split second that lasts a lifetime, I am strength itself, I am the weight, I am the Universe. 

So, some people pray, others sing mantras, I lift weights. 

I have no spiritual background. My parents are atheist scientists. I am a scientist. For me, reason is poor help for tougher issues as to the meaning of existence, or meaning itself. As with everything else where reason and knowledge have failed me, I have to trust a deeper wisdom. I have to trust my body and the way it reaches inner realms of my mind, or even soul, if that exists at all. I don’t know what it is, I have no labels and no explanation. All I know is that lifting takes me into contact with a “bigger whatever”, a larger dimension, an alternative form of consciousness. People have different names for this experience. I prefer not to name it – just live it. 

The terror I felt yesterday was akin to having the doors of a Temple slammed at my face. I felt cut off from a vital part of myself. I haven’t slept well tonight, in spite of feeling drained and tired yesterday. But I am serene. I know I have something to learn from all this, as with any adversity. 

If lifting is for me a major source of meaning and my true path to transcendence, I cannot ignore the fact that lifting is an activity I share with other people that approach it quite differently. For other people, lifting may be a source of social identity. “Who are you?” Answer: “I am a lifter!”. He or she may spend the day stamping numbers and dates in stupid forms in an impersonal, castrating, bureaucratic environment, but at 6PM (s)he heads for the gym. Bars, disks, chalk, screams, heavy metal, laughter and friends – the lifter becomes a human being again. I have had the privilege to watch the construction of positive identities at a slum in São Paulo through lifting. I have seen couples bonding, getting married and having kids through lifting. 

Another important reason for lifting is because it is FUN. As one friend pointed out, life is shi**y enough as it is, why make it even more? These are lifters that truly run away from stressful lifting environments and value the pleasure element both in training and competition. These guys make the best workout buddies and, also, great friends. They’re in the game for the fun of it, they are determined to be happy and they will try to make everyone around happy as well. In meets, they help everyone, regardless of team or federation. They don’t lie. They don’t cheat. But they may get nasty when they see others cheat, take advantage of circumstancial problems or start bickering over things such as rules, gear, etc. 

I tried to describe categories of motives for lifting, but actually most of us do it for a mixture of reasons. Some people are mostly fun-driven, but also have an important (even if little recognized) transcendent component. Others are socially motivated, but value fun and life-quality as well. 

There is a fourth, quite distinct category of motives for lifting (or for engaging in any competitive activity), which is the title-oriented individual. This is the only category that I tend to consider negative. Obviously, we all value reward. Reward is or should be a measure of one’s accomplishments and allows the lifter to move forward. However, there is a major difference between facing reward as a result of accomplishment and reward as an end in itself. Let me try and illustrate my point. A few months ago, my friend Caramello lifted in a local State competition in Rio. He validated a 594lb bench press. Caramello never refers to the accomplishment as “winning the State Championship”, but as “having validated my 594lb”. I wonder if he remembers at all what the meet was about. Sure, he is the rightful State Champion, but that matters much less than his new mark of 594lbs. Here is a lifter who values reward as a measure of his accomplishment. Let me give you another example: my most valuable title is of South American Bench Press Champion (IPF). I seldom mention it. The reason is that my mark at the occasion was pathetically low, a mere 148.5lbs, done on my only valid second lift. I was a lousy lifter at this meet: no emotional control, lost my first lift and had my third lift invalidated for some reason I never understood. I won the title because the other lifter was even worse than me – and there were only the two of us. What does this title mean, besides its pompous name? Now, I do value my 214.5lb lift done at a National Championship at a local federation, with a cast over my broken leg. I was focused, concentrated, serene and determined. I did what I was prepared to do. And I am proud of the result. I really don’t care which title this lift granted me – all I know is that I validated 214.5lbs. 

I tend to see the title-driven attitude as negative for several reasons, from the individual to the collective. Individually, it is precisely the opposite from the transcendence-lift. The lift itself is devoid of meaning – the title is all there is. Whereas transcendence integrates, title focus alienates. It is the dark side of the sport and the unhealthy side of competition. Personally, it is a pain in the as*, since nobody can stand ego trips and self-marketing for too long. On the collective level, it is the driving force behind cheating, federation in-fight and all other forms of unethical behavior in sports. At an even larger perspective, it is the worst possible example to set for the youth, that so much needs sports and merit-based healthy activities for their intellectual, physical and moral development. 

I lift for all the good reasons I listed above, and because there is no sensation to compare with it! 

I woke up before the alarm rang, opened my eyes a little confused. The feeling was weird, as if I hadn’t slept at all, as if I’d been on a journey through dangerous tasks. Tired, uptight. Needed to have a nice breakfast and head for the gym – later, I had a meeting before the judge with the person my family and I are suing. He is an ex-partner in a business he misused our money and we had no choice but litigation. I hated the idea of meeting this person – there are too many things that look wrong in that picture apart from having cheated my family: an ethos of “anything goes” as far as taking advantage of any opportunity, no matter who he hurts; total lack of empathy towards other people’s needs; a disgusting political and social view and a sexist approach to women. Besides treating bodybuilding as a resource for ego trips and other, darker gains. I tried not to think of all that while preparing my stuff – wrist wraps, belt, gear, clothes – but involuntary thoughts and images kept floating before me like ghosts. Tired as I felt, it was even harder to push them away. 

And then it happened: I tried to lift and… my muscles had no strength. It is hard to describe how it felt. It is hard to describe physical weakness, but this is exactly what it was: any weight was too much weight and it was like an empty tube of nothingness inside me drained whatever energy I had left to move. I got up from the bench feeling as though I had run 10 miles, or swam for two hours. Not like I had lifted heavy and fatigued my muscles: a different kind of weakness, a weakness from within. In spite of the growing lethargy, I tried to find an explanation for what was happening. Actually, I needed more than an explanation: I needed to understand what was going on. 

No explanation: my strength had left me. The idea of losing the one thing I most treasure in myself expanded in the form of terror. If I still knew how to cry, I would have. 

I am home now, still at loss as to what happened today. 

Learning from the evolution of scientific knowledge (or how federation rulebook obsession might either kill the sport or be a symptom of radical change) 

The question spree started with “what is this thing on the telescope?”, “what the hell is this blur on the specter”, evolved into issues such as “what is matter?”, “what is life” and finally “what is truth?”, “what is knowledge?”, “where is God?” and “who am I?”.  The first part is the perception of “anomaly” – according to Thomas Kuhn, the first expression of a movement towards radical change in scientific knowledge. It means people realize there is something wrong with the model they are using, but they still have only that model to use. So they put a lot of effort to patch up the model here and there where it shows signs of wearing. This is the “had-hoc explanation” stage, where people get anxious and uptight because they are failing to carry-on their normal life based on the model, which doesn’t work very well anymore. 

The following stage is open crisis and people start asking basic matter-of-fact questions: if the whole thing about life was bullshit, then what is life, after all? Or what is matter? Or what is a species? Or whatever. Finally, there is the meta-science stage, where the crisis is totally mature and everybody has gone crazy and wildly critical of everything. So they start questioning their activity and obsessively discussing rules and more rules. It is an extremely “normative” period in everybody’s life. “This is good science – no: this is horrible science!” “All science is revolutionary – no: science is always conservative except during revolutions”. And so on, with the usual additional claims of “I am right and you are totally wrong” or “you are against ME, therefore against SCIENCE, therefore you are the ENEMY and therefore you are a s.o.b.”. 

So, where does powerlifting come into the story? Right here! The powerlifting mainstream is obviously deep in “meta-activity” (how should we call this? Meta-lifting?…): the number of bytes wasted (oops: sorry, I meant “employed”) on rule discussion far exceeds (by many orders of magnitude) technical discussion. Hair-splitting arguments over the exact amount of glute contact with the bench that qualifies a valid Bench-press dominate a good part of many meets. And while years and tons of writing on which bench shirt models, cuts or fabric should or should not be legal, an interested lifter has one single good article to read on what are bench shirts, what they are made of, how they are used and the differences between them (Shawn Lattimer’s “An Introspective Look at Bench Shirts”). 

I have attended a championship two weeks ago where it downed on me, at a certain point, that referees were much more interested in the exercise of applying rules than in the lifts or the lifters. The focus of the event shifted, perversely, from lifting to law-enforcement. The “in doubt, benefit the lifter” principle was inverted 180o: thumbs were always on the red button and a shadow on the bencher’s head meant “no-lift”. What does this mean? I hope it means we are on the verge of a radical change in the sport. That this is just an expression of temporary loss of meaning and that soon a new order might emerge. Another symptom of this condition is the fact that many of the best lifters got so sick with the “law-enforcement” environment that they just left and started creating novel institutional arrangements for the sport. 

Certain local, non-sanctioned meets became traditional and today attract more attention and better performance than events in official federations’ calendars. These trends tend to grow, rather than shrink. There is no possible way of quenching them through any means besides thorough professionalization of the sport and pouring of big money in it – which won’t happen in this galaxy. Not even the unlikely promotion of powerlifting to Olympic status would do the trick. 

As I see it, the revolution is pretty advanced. Alternatives are spread out for all practitioners to choose from (and more may come). The sport will never return to its original raw-only, etc, etc state – History is irreversible, in science, in sport – in life!!  

One of my friends collects miniature cars. He may spend hours discussing details of a certain model and he attends collectors meetings. Well, I love powerlifting equipment. You may say “yeah, ok, but you ARE a powerlifter, so you like the equipment because of the performance advantage it provides you”. Wrong. I like equipment, period. 

I like to read about them, look at them, touch them, understand how they work, materials, cuts, sewing, groove, stretch – EVERYTHING. Whenever I receive new equipment, I feel exactly as a child unwrapping presents at Christmas. I counted the days until my package from Alan arrived with a collection of new knee and wristwraps for me to test and use. 

Yesterday, I got a new Titan Katana from Erica. I gave her a Fury, which works better for her (I also got two Fury shirts, two F6, different numbers, and one Hades). Will it give me a stupendous carry-over and big numbers? I don’t know! I want to understand it, talk to it, listen to it, learn it’s potential and explore all the possibilities with it. One of my friends is a bench shirt manufacturer in Brazil: Kleber Caramello, owner of HADES bench shirts. I have a red HADES which I still didn’t get to use in meets and I still must take time to learn how to use. It is a very good shirt, special for low groove, arched BP. I often bug him about making shirts from alternative materials. Sometimes I see a weird fabric in a waiting room couch and wonder how it would behave being cut for a bench shirt. And I picture Caramello dressed with an impressive open back shirt all patterned with pastel flowers and light green leafs, benching 700lbs. 

My next adventure will be a denim shirt. Some day. 

Last weekend I went to Rio for a local federation (CONBRAFA) national powerlifting championship. It was legal to register as single lift, so I went for Bench Press only lifting, with my velcro cast on the leg. 

We went, Thiaguinho, Renato and I, plus Fernanda, on a São Paulo-Rio interstate bus. We had to laugh at the people who looked at us as if we were a freak show: a tiny muscular woman on a cast, a huge 350lbs lifter and two “average” people. Probably the managers, human. 

The best things about this meet were being away from baby-sitting a broken leg at home the whole day, doing a pretty good lift, considering and having fun with the team, in this order. You, unbroken people, have no idea what it feels like to be a month and a half on a cast – everything you had to “discover” about the limits of your self-sufficiency, you already did; all your patience with mobility restrictions, you overused, and all your anxiety about going back to heavy training and real life, including sex in the first place, is at a super-compensation climax. You get the picture… 

I was very satisfied with the lift itself (take a look at my videos). Actually, I believe it is one of my best. First, I employed the “zen-focused” approach I’ve been studying and practicing more successfully than I thought I could. Second, I believe I did technically ok, under the circumstances. The limit was the leg, and I failed the third attempt precisely after feeling the shock wave through my fracture. This is what I call “learning”: it is the nice beginning of a long and exciting journey.