I wish I had some middle-aged-lady friends who wanted to lift weights with me. It's nice to have a lifting buddy. You can cheer each other on; you can spot each other when you're doing hard things. I suspect it wouldn't feel quite as lonely in the Bro Zone if I had a workout pal.
"Everybody's nice in the gym," Joe tells me. "Even if they look scary, everybody's always friendly and helpful."
I am finding this to be a leetle less true for me, though. I was not always especially welcoming to that one lonely guy in Pilates class, so maybe I understand why the weight room guys might seem a little standoffish.
Lately I've been making slower headway. I've been more cautious about bumping up the weight I'm moving, opting instead to bump up the reps with weights I know I can handle. I don't want to be like "OF COURSE I can bench 90 pounds!" and then get pinned under the barbell, gasping for air while all the beefy bros around me carry on with their workouts, their AirPods blocking out the sound of the sad middle-aged lady wheezing "HELP!" (Why yes, I do seem to catastrophize about any workout regimen I undertake. Catastrophizing is practically my superpower. I'm pretty confident there are no kraken in the weight room, but plenty of other catastrophes loom.)
Still, I'm definitely making headway. I did use the 35-pound dumbbells for shoulder press today. My squat is just barely into triple digits, but I'm pleased that it's there. I look forward to lifting workouts in a way that I have very seldom looked forward to endurance workouts. Today I watched a Jeff Nippard video because it looked interesting to me, not because Joe wanted to know what I thought about it.
It's weird to be the only person in my demographic in the space, though. There are other faculty who use the pool and the cardio machines and the track. The weight room is almost entirely students, the large majority of whom are male.
I'm about 98% certain that I have the strength to do an unassisted pull-up now, but I'm not quiiiite sure how to make the transition away from the pull-up machine. The prospect of going for it on the pull-up bar and failing in public is a discouraging one. I need to figure out how to balance my unhelpful tendency toward self-doubt against the reality that it's not a super-friendly environment. But you know, when I picked up a pair of 35-pound dumbbells for shoulder press this morning, I thought to myself, "This is a bad idea; I can't do it." And I was wrong. I might be telling myself the same false thing about pull-ups. I think on Saturday I'll do a warmup set on the platform pull-up machine and then give it a go on a pull-up bar. What's the worst that could happen? Whatever the outcome, it is unlikely to involve a kraken attack.
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