On maintenance.

How is it I haven’t written about this yet? Four years ago now, I started lifting weights and I’ve kept at it—barring the occasional illness or injury, extended vacation and other assorted life obstacles—even while I was super-duper pregnant for a minute there. Two or sometimes three days a week, I’m at the gym, picking up heavy stuff and putting it down.

Many other people write more thoroughly on exercise—the whys and whats and whatnots. I don’t mean to proselytize, though I have found many material benefits to being stronger—the ability to, with minimal effort, lug my now 25-pound-child around the yard in his sled; opening a jar that the Hulk has apparently closed; getting my bike up the stairs.

I just do it to stay alive, I told someone once, joking—and yet. This morning, I pinched my own fingers between two plates as as I loading up the bar. It hurt like hell, a minor indignity of having a body and a brain that can, apparently, be in two different places at once.

It brought me back down to Earth, though. There again in the moment, anchored by the ache in my slightly smashed hand. I kept going. Finished one set and then another. Afterward, I stretched for a bit, attention going to the places I worked hardest. I don’t get sore anymore, not unless it’s been too long since the last time.

See you again, says the guy at the desk as I’m heading out the door.