You wait patiently as each second on the clock ticks. You rock in your office chair waiting until you can punch the clock and dash for the door. You are man; you are animal.
Every ticking moment of your life depends on what happens when the clock strikes five. Until then, you are nothing more than a guy in a shirt and tie answering calls for a company you hate. You loathe yourself for working there, but you know freedom is soon upon the horizon.
Finally, 5:00 p.m. hits. Bitches are going to die. You guzzle your third chicken shake with vigorous authority and march past your pedestrian coworkers. They head for Starbucks; you head for a leg day. You are better than them.
While everyone is getting into a BMW, VW Beetle, or some other yuppie hootenanny, you climb into your 1984 Astrovan. You sacrificed getting new brakes because you spent your last fifty bucks on MyoOxidized Branched Chain Amino Acids 3000 and krill oil. You are your master.
To the Mecca you go, free from the real world torture of working too much and earning too little. You know that the gym is as close to human evolution as possible. The strongest will always survive, jumping over the weak in an attempt to achieve maximum hypertrophy.
You don your tank top and shorts with pride, shimmering of joy. You know that to wear a tank top you need to have biceps cut like zirconium, but you’ll settle on amethyst instead. That doesn’t matter though. Only those teenage punks with bad haircuts and acne do endless sets of towel buddy curls.
You walk over to the nearest squat rack in your Chuck Taylors. You go to move the pathetic 65 lbs from the front of the rack, but you feel a tap on your shoulder. Go figure—it’s the newbie with braces and glasses…curling. No one curls in your squat rack.
You heave the youngster across the gym with relative ease and snicker to yourself while setting up for your double looped, reverse band, chain, dynamic, eight-inch box, close stance, high bar, buffalo bar squats. No one is more hardcore than you.
With each rep looking more and more like something out of a sadomasochist flick, you rack your sixteenth double. You give everyone within one hundred feet a look that would make an onion cry, a look that scares the souls of children and brings the common man to a standstill.
Three and a half hours later, you have done glute ham raises and lunges, sparing plenty of time for incessant conversations about how Bulgarian Grade A creatine is 643.46 percent more cell volumizing than Norwegian Fish-Seal-Whale Homogenized MicroFine creatine. The words are exchanged with fierce bravado and a strong belief in your ATP supplement of choice.
You look at your watch. Almost 9:00 p.m. You still have to get two more meals in; take your dandelion root, green tea, and yohimbe bark; and actually pay attention to your wife. Life just isn’t fair.
You pull up to the driveway knowing your wife will give you hell for leaving the tuna fish uncovered in the fridge. Little does she know that when tuna is left uncovered, bifidus erectus, the new high performance strain of yogurt culture you read about on AnabolicIronBrothersForever.com, infiltrates the tuna through reverse hydrogenated osmosis. Or at least that’s what it said in the back of Flex magazine.
You open the door, blood coursing through your veins from a pump that mere mortals would collapse from, to a sight of an angry woman with a box of Franzia. Things aren’t off on the right foot.
She scolds you for your nonstop training regimen and tells you that your marriage is falling apart because you’re too healthy. She loathes that you are a more superior looking being than she is. She’s been on a steady decline since she graduated college.
You nod with that look on your face of deep conviction but really you’re thinking about how a fourth chicken shake would provide you with some steady amino acids. That and how you need to get laid.
You go to bed, your quadriceps settling into a mode of reconstruction, ready to become tree trunks. You smile at night knowing that tomorrow is arm day. You detest idiots who take your squat rack, but you secretly love hammer curls.
It is 4:00 a.m. You’ve awakened when many partiers are just going to bed. You are a supreme human to them. They are the wastes of life whose only goal is to get drunk and cause a ruckus. You protein fart in their direction.
You have your first chicken shake of the day and it tastes like chalk with barbecue sauce. You then remember that baking it at 2000° F for five minutes would be more time efficient than an hour at 350° F. You kick yourself, but this is protein that can’t be sacrificed. So you swallow and gag until you finish it.
You’re into the car at 4:30 a.m., and the wife doesn’t even know you’re gone. You take out your Aborted Fetus CD because it’s the most extreme gruesome death metal band of all time. Their song “Axe to the Ground Don’t Make a Sound” is a haunting epic shredding battle of fury and destruction. You are man; you are animal.
At 5:00 a.m., the doors at the physique palace have opened. Most are dreary eyed, yet to be ready for the challenge that lies ahead. You have already gulped down a Red Bull and three caffeine pills. Your eyes couldn’t shut right now if you attached 100-lb dumbbells to your eyelids.
Chalk the hands up. Do this for the glory. Do this for the inner soul. You sold your lawnmower for a month’s membership. You missed your first born’s birth because you were giving hand-offs at the International and American Drug-Free 200 Percent Pure Raw Powerlifting Nationals. But they were all just the losses you cut so you could be here, in this gym, giving your body the beating of a lifetime.
You hammer curl the 20-lb dumbbells with vindication, knowing that you’re making your body go through an inferno. You are setting your muscles and tendons on fire with each passing rep. The strain on your biceps brachii is as painful as 1000 anvils being dropped on your head.
You flex in the mirror after your cooldown set and realize that this is just the beginning. You smile at the apex of your peaks nearly stretching the measuring tape at fourteen inches. You grunt and march toward the cable curl. You grab a significantly weaker lifter to help spot you with forced reps. Only professionals attempt spotted cable curls. With each forced rep, the brachial arteries swell and gorge with rich, creatine-lathered blood.
Breathing like you just ran a marathon, you speed for a drink of water. There isn’t any time to waste. You still need to do towel buddy curl giant sets. Giant sets are 10,000 reps. Combine that with a buddy and a towel and the roof explodes. Your mind can actually be blown comprehending just how insane this can be.
You slap yourself in the face, grab your ammonia cap, and prepare to take a Tony Montana Scarface like sniff. This is all out war against the masses. You grab the bar like it just did your wife and you make it suffer. With chalk in your eyes, you’ve become partially blind, but you still push forward. Giant sets aren’t for the weak of heart, and your heart is as strong as they come.
The only people in history to have completed a giant set are Chuck Norris and Jeremy Reynolds. Rumors about Jeremy were that he actually missed a set, so he gets an asterisk next to his name. You push forward to be one of those men. You sweat, bleed, and piss for this business. You are powerlifting exemplified. You are its ambassador. You are a modern day gym warrior, and you can defy the odds and towel curl your ass off.
You lay on the ground exhausted, broken down but victorious. The giant set has been conquered. No one has achieved greatness of this magnitude. You are a martyr of the strength world. You deserve your own Met-RX commercial only to be aired one week a year.
It’s 8:00 a.m. Time to be a mortal again…