Episode 36: What will you get from bodybuilding?

Jared and his big lug friend Hunter were training together once again after not having shared a workout since football season started back in September. Hunter went to high school in the next town over, and his team had finished with an equally unimpressive record. I doubted MTV would want to make a reality show about either squad anytime soon. Then again, who knows? Their latest hit was something called “Jersey Shore,” where a house full of cocky, vain, horny young guys and girls who basically got drunk, partied, had random casual sex, and got into bar fights.

One cast member, a tiny young lady named ‘Snookie,’ shot to brief fame after a man knocked her out at a bar. Thanks to so-called ‘reality TV,’ this type of behavior is what an entire generation is growing up to see as perfectly normal and acceptable. The two sixteen-year-olds before me luckily seemed to have enough common sense to realize that being arrogant and obnoxious typically didn’t win you points in the actual, real world where camera crews don’t follow you around 24/7, and bad behavior is usually frowned on and punished.

The way things were looking; Jared’s dad Jeff might be making his comeback to the stage before his son entered his first contest. Jared was turning seventeen near the very end of the summer, which meant he would still be seventeen for most of next summer. After carefully reviewing photos of various teenage champions at regional bodybuilding contests from the last two years, he had arrived at the conclusion that he had probably underestimated just how good some of these kids looked. Most of them were eighteen or nineteen years old, and there is typically a huge difference, developmentally speaking, in the muscle maturity as a young man shifts from the mid to late teens. And Jared was objective enough to know that at this point in time, he lacked the muscle mass to compare with those older kids. His friend Hunter was doing just fine in the mass department, but I wondered what he would look like dieted down and lean. From what I could ascertain, he would have to work much harder and longer than Jared to get in shape, and I wasn’t sure the end result was going to be very aesthetically pleasing. Then again, I wasn’t even sure Hunter would ever actually compete in bodybuilding. He listened to Jared talk about it, but really didn’t seem very interested. Hunter was definitely built more for something like powerlifting or Strongman, and one look at the kid told you he liked to eat. I had the sneaking suspicion he wouldn’t last long on a contest diet, even with Parrillo pre-contest brownies, cookies, muffins, and spice cakes to curb his crazy cravings.

We had trained legs together, and any nausea that may have been incurred throughout the course of squats, leg presses, stiff-leg deadlifts, leg curls, and walking lunges had dissipated. We were at the front desk. As is my cheap-ass custom, I had my own shake with me from home: a mix of Parrillo Optimized Whey™, Hi-Protein™ (both chocolate) and banana Pro-Carb™. The two teens had ordered their shakes from the front desk, where we were seated. I knew Jared had plenty of powder at home and several shaker bottles. The only reason he was buying a shake here was that it gave him the chance to be in the presence of Laura and gawk at her. Laura worked there, and was far too old at twenty to even give young Jared more than a passing glance. But she happened to bear a striking resemblance to Kim Kardashian, so Jared was more than happy to sit and bask in her beauty even if he was invisible to her. Hunter didn’t talk a whole lot, but he was the one who asked the question that sparked the
discussion this day.

“Hey Ron, I was telling one of my friends who works out about you. He wanted to know what contests you’ve won?” Jared frowned without ever breaking his gaze at the object of his adolescent lust. He knew I didn’t have an impressive competitive record, and he must have thought I would be offended by the question – far from it.

“Technically, I won my class at one show in 1995, and then my class and an Overall in 2007 – out of a total of 22 contests in twenty years.”

“Um, you’re a pro though, right?” he continued. I smiled at that one.

“Not at all, hunter-gatherer, not even close. And I don’t have an endorsement contract with a magazine or a supplement company. Any money I get from them is from my writing. But ask me a different question.”

Hunter looked over to Jared for help. Jared shrugged his shoulders and returned to staring at the back of Laura’s head as she fielded a phone call. Hunter looked back at me, lost. He was a good kid, but not terribly gifted in intellect. We all have our own unique talents. I bet back in the Ice Age this kid would have been one bad-ass Mastodon killer, capable of feeding entire tribes of prehistoric humans all winter long. Winter being all year long in those days, I should add.

“What has bodybuilding done for me?” I asked Hunter. This may already have been the longest conversation I’d ever had with the kid.

“Um, gave you big muscles?” he answered, which was the reply I had expected.

“Yeah, that’s one thing, sure. I was a very skinny kid. I remember trying out for the chess team in junior high and the coach telling me to come back next year if I could put on twenty pounds.” Hunter looked perplexed. Oh well, it was one of my oldest and corniest jokes anyway. Maybe it was time to put it out to pasture. “I had very little confidence as a kid, very low self-esteem. As I started to transform my body into a bigger and stronger version, that changed. I didn’t feel that sense of inferiority anymore around practically all other males, and I could actually talk to females without feeling abject terror.” Hunter didn’t register that either, probably because he had never been small and weak. He probably popped out of his mom and shoved the
delivering obstetrician back into a wall for disturbing his nine-month nap. “Bodybuilding also gave me a career,” I continued. “I never did become the pro bodybuilder I dreamed about in my early years of training, but I’ve worked in the media side of the sport in either TV production or magazine writing for literally half my life now. I have gone to all the big contests and know all the top pro’s, some of them pretty well. Trained with a few. And even if I haven’t won a lot of shows, I’ve done pretty well and met thousands of great people at them over the years. Without bodybuilding, I really don’t know where I would be or what I would be doing
right now.”

Hunter grunted to let me know he had been listening. Jared was still distracted. Now he was looking angry, because some young tattooed guy with one of those ‘faux-hawk’ hairstyles was chatting up Laura, and her smile told you she didn’t mind his company. From past experience, I knew that whether or not this guy was in the middle of a workout or not, he would stay as long as possible. They all did. Jared slurped the last bit of shake from the bottom of his big cup.

“We should get going. My dad will be here any minute, I just texted him,” Jared informed Hunter.

“Hold on, I want to say a couple more things to both of you.” Jared indulged me. “I have known people that used bodybuilding to come back to health and vitality after something like cancer or a terrible car accident, people who used bodybuilding as something to focus on while beating a drug or alcohol addiction, and people who got their self-esteem and a positive outlook back through bodybuilding after abusive relationships, divorce, the death of a loved one, you name it. Some of these people looked really good by bodybuilding standards, but most of them didn’t. None of them won a big contest or got a fat sponsorship deal. But each and every person I have known that became a bodybuilder reaped untold rewards.”

Hunter knit his large brows, while Jared snickered. “He’s a writer, dude, sometimes he talks like that,” he explained to his friend.

“All I’m trying to say to you guys is that everyone that becomes a bodybuilder and dedicates him or herself to it will definitely get a better body. But that’s really just part of what you can get from it. And whether you two ever earn some spectacular title and get on magazine covers or not, you’ll never regret the time and energy you put into bodybuilding. It all pays off, with tons of interest.”

The boys left soon after that, and on the short ride home I thought about all the bodybuilders I had met over the years who were never going to make a living as a physique competitor, but had done it purely for the love of the game. In their own way, each and every one of them was a success story. And the truly wonderful thing is, there are a million more stories I’ve never heard about, and a million more waiting to be written.