Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Lifting these 25-lb. weights is something I enjoy. For a man of my significance it's a paltry lump of iron but it hurts enough that I know I'm doing fine. There's a moment in the second rep of ten where I'm hefting 50 lbs. from my sides to over my head. And between the sixth and seventh lift, just over the halfway mark of the set, I go: okay, well, that's it. I did enough. We'll finish this up later.

I have to negotiate. Well Paul, I say to myself, I guess it's too bad that you don't want to do that, because you have to do it three more times, and then ten more times, and slowly, and correctly, and safely.

No, I say. I'm pretty sure the right thing here is that we're done.

God, I say. You have the most delicious breasts.

Thanks, I say. They're sort of smaller than they used to be, though.

Remember, I say to myself, remember when Ned Beatty scrabbled up that riverbank?

Then I lift the weights.

Now how far I can take it isn't very far. But then again in July if you'd told me I'd be taking 40-mile bike rides by October I wouldn't have seen how. If you told me I'd be messing around with weights and enjoying it I'd have nodded as if I knew what you were talking about. But I would have been thinking about muffins. I thought about muffins all the time. I still think about muffins from time to time, like you might remember a high-school crush who wrote you letters but ended up losing her virginity to the guy who played first saxophone. (That didn't happen. But it might as well have.)

I like weights and bicycling. The rules for both are: (1) don't get hurt; and (2) don't hurt anyone else. Those are all the rules. No hat-tricks or field goal conversions. There's no winning. You fail and fail and fail. Your fantasies of success drift away and are replaced by the body at hand.

I've become aware in the last month or two of how far I am from fitness. It wasn't that I had some vision of my own incredible strength deluding me. It's just that I had no concept and even less interest. I associated health with weight loss and left it at that. It was like hard math or the philosophy of language--say, like the ideas of Saul Kripke, which I find impenetrable. I now have questions: Why does my body want to stop after six pushups? What is this new hollow area around the shoulder? Should I be chasing the pedals or pushing them? What should I do about my left leg? Why does my right eye droop?

Looking at photos of myself from a party last week I was unphased. Normally I squint when I'm told that pictures are attached, and brace myself. It wasn't just that the photo might be bad but that it would serve as a reminder of the terrible gap between what I felt I should do and what I was actually doing. My wedding pictures were the worst this way--it was an amazing day but all I could see was my monolithic self, my great shorn head. And I was ashamed that I saw only that. There was so much more to see.

But now it's no big deal. Sure, my cheeks are as fleshy as a pig's hocks, and my huge nose, and my, etc. I'm a big dude in those photos. I need to lose 70-100 pounds still, and I can hardly lift any weight at all. I'm a slow biker. I'm gray. But there I am. I'm interested in my reflection not for vanity but like an ape or child discovering how much can be learned from the mirror. The first part of the project is complete; I can look at myself without lying to myself.

If I could have avoided this I would have. But I couldn't have avoided it, not without my heart bursting out of my rib cage and running away through the wheatfield, trailing arteries, in protest.

I am against the normal as it is defined by the world. The normal is like the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz. Horrible and annoying and swooping down all the time to mess up your journey. But I like the inner normal, the personal normal. Equilibrium. The rock in the stream. I'd say I'm closer than I have ever been to that normal, and less interested in the other kind--I don't need so much to please as much as I need to do.

Weight: 295.25 lbs