“FCI?” I was familiar with the governing bodies of powerlifting, the ADFPA (American Drug-Free Powerlifting Association), the USPF (United States Powerlifting Federation), the IPF (International Powerlifting Federation), and the WBPC (World Bench Press Congress), but I had never heard of FCI.
Titanium clued me in with a whisper. “Federal Correction Institution.” He went on to admit with some pride that he held the all-time high for 242’s at the Texas Federal Prison, Texarkana.
As politely as possible, I removed myself from Titanium to tell the record keeper of my second attempt, 385 pounds. All according to plan, first 365, then 385, and lastly, for glory, 405.
After only one round, the competition was gearing up in expected fashion. I had anticipated this much from Powerlifting USA. The best bench pressers were the competitors in the 181- and 198-pound categories. Like my friend Hero, they combined large chests and short arms for startling results. In the state of California, the record holder for the bench in the 198-pound class, B. Ravenscroft, has lifted an astounding 581 pounds, while the record holder for the heavier weight class of 220 pounds has a personal best of 50 pounds less. I consoled myself with this fact as I watched men 50 pounds lighter than myself lifting one hundred pounds more than I could. If anything, my body was made for deadlifting. There, long arms and short legs are an advantage. Here, I was out of my element.
The PA system announced a short intermission, signaling the completion of the first round. I wandered to the door and stuck my head out, waving to my friends in attendance from the gym. Lamar, his Mohawk neatly trimmed by his father, was occupied by the carob bar in his hands and Cuddles in his lap. Moses nodded and smiled. Vinnie, standing on his chair, was pointing to the far corner of the room and shouting something at me.
I followed his finger and found the rest of the crowd congregating in the far corner of the gym. Standing behind a makeshift booth, I spotted a small, familiar figure. Where had I seen him before?
Why, it was Dr. Squat himself! Fred Hatfield, from the pages of Powerlifting USA and the Budweiser World Record Breakers—the first man in history to squat over a thousand pounds! In the magazines, looking stronger than an ox, he shook his fist to the sky in his STAND AND DELIVER T-shirt. I walked over and found him behind his booth, peddling his signature weight-lifting belts. The Thor, The Valhalla, and The Viking. I couldn’t help notice, though, that in the flesh Dr. Squat looked less like a Teutonic warrior than a beleaguered and downtrodden Saxon villager. First, it was his weight. Seventy pounds lighter than in his championship days in Hawaii, he was drowning in his own clothes. Second was his hair. All that remained on his shiny noggin were a few scattered gray threads. Those dull and glazed eyes belonged on a dead fish. Judging by his appearance, the thousand-pound squat and the supplementing and force-feeding that had gone into it had nearly killed him.
But before I could so much as examine his American Power Belt, the second round began. I retreated to the warm-up room to practice a few light sets before my next attempt. I rubbed my palms and fingers with chalk to ensure a firm grip on the bar.
Vinnie joined me and helped Turbo and Titanium squeeze me into the Inzer Blast Shirt again. I tightened my wrist wraps. I heard my name on the PA system. It was all in the mind, I realized. I allowed no negative thoughts to enter my consciousness. Barreling through the doors into the raw sunlight, I felt an unshakable conviction. There was no stopping me. Not this time. I paused on the platform, the crowd murmured. I quickly spun around, arranged myself on the bench, and held my hands out at arm’s length from my chest. Three hundred eighty-five pounds. I was ready.
I grabbed the steel bar in a flash and gripped it with everything I had, which sent chalk down to my face like sawdust in the sunlight. I counted to three, my spotters lifted the bar to my locked arms, and away I went. I gasped. It felt like a ton of bricks as it dove down to park on my chest. The clap, the clap, finally the clap. Up the bar flew. But now trouble. Two inches off my chest, it would not budge. I felt the crowd behind me, screaming.
“Like a human piston, Sam, like a human piston!” Macon shouted.
Right. A machine, clockwork, precision, unthinking, unfeeling. I caught my second wind and pushed.
“Lighter than a broomstick, Sam!” I heard Macon’s shout again.
But it wasn’t. It was heavier than a baby grand. Slowly, then with increasing speed, the bar headed back to my Adam’s apple. The official spotters jerked it back onto the trestles.
In my disappointment, I kept my face averted from the crowd and made my way back to the other lifters in the warm-up room. They were full of commiseration. More than one contestant sought me out to inform me that I had nearly had it, that I was just an inch or two away from the initial lockout phase.
My technique, they said, was the problem. One of the 220’s advised me: “Your first mistake: waiting on the fat man to clap. Don’t wait, man, you got to anticipate the motherfucker.”
A shorter lifter joined the argument: “That’s right,” he said, draping an arm around my shoulder. “You got to learn to cheat, man. Make the fat man work for you!”
The more I watched the other competitors, the more I realized that they were right. The best lifters, like Chip Taylor, brought the bar down to their chests and paused all right, but only for a second, not for two or three as I had done.
Immediately, I began my preparations for the third and final lift. I couldn’t very well go on to 405 now—not after failing at 385. And as badly as I missed 385, I couldn’t select a lower weight now, not according to powerlifting rules. That left 385 again.
I was no longer nervous, just infuriated. I had let everyone down. My self-disgust grew as I watched in the third and final round the 181’s and 198’s play with weights in the high 400’s and, in one lifter’s case, the low 500’s. And I, all I could do was 365? Pathetic!
This was it. Once more, I applied liberal doses of chalk to my hands, my chest, my face, and bottom. Before I went on, Vinnie appeared in the warm-up room, doing his best to psych me up for the lift. Desperate times demanded desperate measures.
First, the “Heightened Arousal Mode.” “Do the right thing, Vinnie!” I screamed, bracing myself for the worst. Vinnie tightened a black kid-leather lifting glove onto his hand, drew his fist back and delivered a blow so severe it sent me staggering.
Second, the Arnold Mental Visualization Principle, which I utilized on my wavering way to the bench press. I imagined myself in a “’roid rage” crushing an infant’s pacifier before his dewy eyes. Up on the platform, I was as ready as I could be. At the count of three, I snatched the bar from my spotters and let it drop down to my chest. It felt like nothing. I paused it professionally, and, a split second before hearing the clap, exploded upwards. Perfect. So close they couldn’t call me on it.
My progress was steady. Seven inches, eight, nine. I was just entering the initial lockout phase, and I was still smiling. Suddenly, the bar stopped. Nothing worked, not my screams, not the wild buckling of my hips, not even Vinnie’s encouraging roar (“EXPLODE! EXPLODE!”). In the end, it was just too much. Again, the attendants grabbed the bar on its downward descent. The spectators gave me a polite round of applause, mostly spearheaded by the boys, I noticed.
In the trophy presentation that followed, all the lifters gathered in the first few rows with their relatives, friends, and fellow gym rats. The presentation, like the order of the lifting itself, was arranged by weight class. This meant Titanium and I watched together as the other competitors received their trophies first. The winner of the open division, by Schwartz Formula, was the 123-pound Chip Taylor who bench pressed nearly three times his body weight. Finally, the 242-pound class was announced.
Though there were two other competitors in my weight class, I was the first to be called to get my award. “And in third place …” Gus announced. Vinnie and the rest of the boys clapped madly, as I rose and did “th
e Walk” between the aisles to the podium. After all the three on, one offs, the supplementing, the food, the drugs, at last I had a trophy to tell me just who and what I was.
When I reached Gus, he covered the microphone with a massive paw, bent slightly in my direction, and whispered in my ear “Look son, we had more competitors than we thought in your weight class. We thought you’d enter as a 275. So this is the best we can do. Sorry about that, Stan.” He patted my rump sympathetically, and handed me a plaque on which were inscribed in gold plate the words:
Women 148 lbs
First Place
11. THE BLITZ
IT OFTEN OCCURRED TO HIM THAT IT WAS ALL PROBABLY MEANINGLESS ANYWAY, A KIND OF GAME. BUT IF IT TOOK A GAME TO KEEP HIM ALIVE, SO BE IT.
—HARRY CREWS
My disappointment at the Ninth Annual Rose City Bench-Press Extravaganza, my narrow escape from “bombing”—there was no time to consider any of this now. I had just six weeks until the Mr. San Gabriel Valley, and then, a week after that, the Mr. Golden Valley. Most bodybuilders give themselves 10 to 12 weeks of preparation for the contest countdown. With only half the time, I would have to work twice as hard. Vinnie couldn’t stress it enough when I met him and Nimrod, veterans both of many muscle wars, for a power conference at Shangri-La. “Big Man,” he said, grabbing my arm and looking directly into my eyes, “it’s time to end the larval stage and emerge a butterfly, a butterfly with big man muscles and a competition tan.”
Vinnie told me not to panic if I didn’t gain any more size before the contest. The goal, now, wasn’t to get bigger: there was too little time for that. It was simply to appear to be bigger. And the only way to achieve this muscular trompe l’oeil was by improving the quality of my muscle and by losing fat, 15 to 20 pounds of it, in fact.
Vinnie had just the means to achieve this transformation. He waved a piece of paper above his head and slammed it down on the table before me. Carefully calibrated by himself and Nimrod, it was my dietary chart for 5½ of the next 7 weeks.
It read:
All the joys of my five-thousand-calorie-a-day habit were gone. No more milk, not even nonfat milk. It was deemed nutritionally wasteful for competition. No more protein shakes. They were far too caloric. No more red meat. In fact, there would be practically no more anything, even tap water (whose sodium content was too high).
The aim of this diet was to keep my fat and sodium levels to a minimum, while juggling my carbohydrate to protein ratio. The juggling would start in the final 10 days before the contest. First, I would have to deplete my carbs and add slightly more protein. Then, 4 days before the contest, I would suddenly reverse the procedure, carbo-loading. It was a fine line. Not enough carbs, and I’d end up looking anemic. Too many, and I’d look bloated.
If I timed it right, on the day of the contest my skin would look as tight as a drum. Bodybuilders call it the “shrink-wrap” fit. According to Nimrod, it was the only way “to show your finer aesthetic qualities, your intercostals, the cross-striations on your quadriceps and triceps heads.”
It was imperative that I start my diet immediately. The effect of elasticized parchment paper for skin can be obtained only gradually. As Vinnie said, “Too much weight lost too quickly leaves you with loose folds of skin on the posin’ dais. It’ll make you look like a Sharpei dog.”
But Vinnie and Nimrod knew that my body weight probably wouldn’t be a problem. Even after increasing my red meat intake for the strength contest, my fat content was abnormally low for a bodybuilder off-season. The mystery was what I would look like after this diet. Some bodybuilders lose their muscles along with their fat from forced weight loss. What with their fake tans and long, strandy ropes for muscles, they look like turbanned fakirs. Come contest time, would I have any muscles and muscle shape left?
One way to improve my muscle shape was to temporarily halt my steroid program. Vinnie instructed me to conclude my injectables, the testosterone and the Deca a full 10 days before the contest, since both drugs have a reputation for causing water retention. The orals, the Anavar, could be used up to 7 days before the contest.
But I didn’t worry about going off—not yet, anyway (the psychological ramifications of that would come later). I worried about staying on for the next 7 weeks. What with my preparations for the strength contest, 16 straight weeks seemed an exceptionally long cycle to me, but not to Vinnie, who clued me in on the boys and girls of Venice.
“Shit, Big Man, some of those eighteen-wheelers don’t go off for a full year. Compared to them, you’re cleaner than a Safeway chicken. …”
So, while Tara fretted about her vocational future behind Shangri-La’s counter (“I mean, like, it’s between industrial psychology, you know how I am with people, or like, equestrian therapy … I mean, I’m really excellent with kids, too”), I set about meeting my own destiny.
From seven to nine every morning, and again from five to seven every evening, I fell back into my by now old habit of three on, one off training, with one major exception. It was now seven on, none off, a perpetual recycling. I couldn’t afford the luxury of rest days. The first morning, it was chest and shoulders, that night, biceps and triceps, the next morning, quads, the next night, calves and hamstrings, the next morning, back and traps, that night shoulders and forearms, ad infinitum. Abs every day. Five hundred reps, broken down into ten sets of 50, took an extra 30 minutes. After the excursion into powerlifting training, it was a relief to return to my old schedule.
In order to shed my veneer of fat and show raw muscle, I blasted through my sets with higher repetitions, at least 15 to 20, which necessitated lower weight. Instead of fifteen sets per body part, the powerlifting norm, I increased it to twenty-five or thirty and concentrated on working the muscle rather than just heaving heavy poundages. The exercises were similar, but the approach was radically different.
Back at my desk in New York, I’d seen a black-and-white photograph of the enormous Arnold doing lateral shoulder raises with a 15-pound weight. I had thought it incredible at the time—such a big man, such a little weight. Now I knew, thanks to Vinnie and Nimrod, that come contest time, these smaller weights were just the thing to slice off fat and reveal underlying muscle size and shape. Contest preparation involves endurance, not strength.
“Train Big, Eat Big, Sleep Big” became “Train Longer and Lighter, Eat Less and Wisely, and Sleep Whenever Possible.” After just 2 weeks of this intensified program, I was training so hard and eating so little that I no longer had energy for anything. Personal training had to go. I informed Moët and Mr. and Mrs. Slatkin and all my other clients that I would be unavailable for the duration. It worked out well for Moët—she was going in for surgery for a quick boob and bottom touch-up and would be incapacitated for the next month as a result anyway. Bamm Bamm temped for me with the others.
Throughout my training sessions, I clung to my visualization principles. Vinnie had won the Golden Valley three years earlier, and on his wall at home hung the fruits of that labor. It was a glorious silver saber (the cusped hilt trimmed in red velvet), awarded to the overall winner of the show. A bronze plaque was affixed to the radiant scabbard, the inscription commemorating Vinnie as builder and man.
I also clung to my clichés. “Formula for success, a straight line, a goal,” was my muscle mantra, penned by that gym favorite, Friedrich Nietzsche. And underneath those great blown-up images of Raoul that hung from the rafters, I recited that mantra until it was an unintelligible whisper as I set about reinventing myself. I will become the person I want to be, I vowed. I will elongate my bicep with preacher curls, I will add to the outside sweep of my quads with the aid of the hack squat machine and a close-grip stance. I will enlarge my neck with the neck harness. I will become a bodybuilder.
But while I kept visualizing the saber and eyeing Raoul up above, I couldn’t help but see myself in the many mirrors of Shangri-La. I examined my frame while I was changing
, while I was pumping out reps, while I was sipping from my bottle of distilled water. The mirror was vital now, according to Vinnie, to be used for an instantaneous progress report.
To be used, in fact, as much as the Medco was to be avoided. Watching the scale register my weight loss could stop me from dieting. To weigh myself would be counterproductive, would confuse mass with class, Vinnie said. My weight was irrelevant. All that mattered was the mirror; it would tell me everything I needed to know. But as I trained in quest of the silver saber, the mirror told me more than I wanted to know.
“Bodybuilding. It’s not just about size, it’s about symmetry,” was a line as common in the gym as in the magazines. “The Apollonian Ideal,” this symmetry was called, after classical Greek sculpture. The neck, the calves, the arms should all be the same size. Ideally, for a man my height, each should measure 20 inches. To be in proper proportion, my chest should measure 60 inches, my waist 32, and my thighs 30 (half my chest).
As the San Gabriel Valley approached, the mirror attested that I was decidedly asymmetrical. My calves were 17 inches, my arms 18, my neck 19. My chest at 52 inches was not twice my thighs (at 28 inches each). My waist was 34, not 32. As a result, I found myself in the gym every day for 5 hours feverishly playing catch-up, trying to bring up my lagging body parts. The more I worked, the more I panicked when one body part started to outdistance another.
Vinnie did his best to calm me down. The judges do not tape-measure physique competitors, he reminded me, they simply examine them from a distance of 20 feet. A bodybuilder with 18-inch arms can make them look better than a rival with 20 inches, if he knows how to show them to the judges and audience. And what if I was a long way off from the ideal? I wasn’t, after all, entering a professional contest, merely the San Gabriel Valley and the Golden Valley a week later. But all that was little consolation. As I saw it, if I wasn’t symmetrical, I wasn’t really a bodybuilder, and if I wasn’t a bodybuilder, then what exactly was I?
Muscle Page 16