Daddy, I want to be strong like you!

I didn't exercise a whole lot after Lindsay and I got married in 2007, and that "not a whole lot" shrank to "too small to measure" once Addison was born in 2010. But in 2011 I finally finished school, we moved to California, and I was ready to get back in the swing of things. I had visions of recapturing the athleticism of my youth. I joined a gym and enrolled Addison in their kids' club (which she hated at first, but has since warmed up to).

The first day I showed up at the gym, I was a assigned a trainer for a preliminary evaluation. Too bad I didn't know you could just opt out of these things. He was a nice dude, but we were clearly on different pages about why I wanted to start using the gym.

Him: "What are your main goals for coming to the gym?" 

Me: "Um, to get in shape?"

Him: "Right. Cool. And if you stick with me, you'll really be able to pop with a tight t-shirt on." 

Me: "Yeah, I guess. But mostly I just want to get stronger and faster." 

Him: "I totally get you, man. And the ladies love the muscles, amirite?"

 The truth is, I don't care a lot about the tight t-shirts. My wife likes my scrawny body just fine as it is, and who else am I trying to impress? What I do care about is being able to out-run and out-climb fast predators. So maybe modern man no longer needs to worry about lions, tigers, or bears (oh my!). But what about dinosaurs?! I've had nightmares about dinosaurs chasing me down for dinner since I was a kid, and I do NOT want to end up like Dennis in Jurassic Park. The dude would not have been able to lift himself into a tree if his life depended on it. It did, actually. And he got eated. And don't even get me started on the looming zombie apocalypse. Ain't no way I'm gonna get trapped in an alley because I can't climb a wall.

Anyway, my bulgy-muscled friend had me do a body fat test, and I came in at about negative 20 percent, indicating that I had a small black hole lodged somewhere in my gut. At 5 feet, 8 inches and 118 pounds, something needed to explain it.

Him: "We've got to fatten you up, man. What do you like to eat?" 

Me: "Um. Cold cereal." 

Him: "No wonder. Replace that with steak."

Seriously, he wanted me to eat steak for every meal. I humored him and did his (very hurty) workout and vaguely committed to filling my belly with flesh as often as I could. But I think the dude got transferred and I never saw him again, which is probably for the best. Who has the money to pay for one of these trainers and multiple steaks per day? Not me, that's for sure.

My gym routine mainly involves hitting a tennis ball in the racquetball court while thinking deep thoughts, or climbing on the stair machine because I can do it while reading a book, though I do jump on the treadmill or into the pool every once in a while. But there's one activity that I reserve for when I get home, because Addison likes to join in the fun:

She hangs off of my legs in awkward positions, leeching away my strength and throwing off my balance. I probably just need to get used to the idea that I'll have a clingy little tumor hanging off of me for the next five or ten years. Though now that I think about it, I just might need those steaks for when she weighs sixty pounds instead of thirty.

I'm tempted to give up. But in the moment that she weighs me down and makes my arms want to explode a little, she says, "Wow, you're really strong, daddy." And so I pump out a few more while she giggles, even though I know I won't be able to move my arms for a week. Maybe there is someone besides my wife I'm trying to impress.

And of course, impressing a little girl also involves performing acrobatic maneuvers that offer no real-life benefits. On the chance that there ever comes a point in my life where it becomes necessary to perform an upside-down pull-up, I suppose I'll have my almost-three-year-old to thank.

And Addison's pretty keen on being strong-like-ox herself.

Now, this is gonna go in a slightly different, stream-of-consciousness direction, so bear with me. This stuff makes me think of an article that was in the New York Times about a month ago, titled "Why Women Can't Do Pull-ups." It summarizes a study done at the University of Dayton to determine whether women can train to do pull-ups, and whether it's a meaningful measure of fitness. The summarization itself isn't particularly insightful, but it generated a lot of interesting comments (including about a million belligerent ones from a legion of CrossFit die-hards), and also a flurry of follow-up articles on other sites. Some proclaimed the need for women to let go of their guilt at not being able to do pull-ups, while others suggested that women need to stop looking for excuses to get out of doing hard things (one even draws a parallel to girls giving up on math in school). Also, there's the fact that by 2014, female Marines will have to perform pull-ups as part of their physical fitness tests.

I kinda want my daughter to be able to do pull-ups. I know that she can be healthy without doing them, at least until she has to get over a wall to escape a pack of velociraptors, but I just think it would be cool for her to explore with confidence the power available in her body. I don't particularly want her to be a Marine, but I'd love for her to have that kind of toughness, both inside and out. Best case scenario: my little girl solving differential equations while doing pull-ups. Maybe while painting a picture with her toes.

Having said that, here's a really interesting and provocative article I found that uses Linda Hamilton's Terminator 2 holy-crap pull-up scene (I was gonna link to it but couldn't find a YouTube video without a lot of blood) as a lens through which to interpret a whole slew of new and  complicated trends in female empowerment. It kind of goes all over the place, and I found myself arguing a lot with it, but it still made me think. Among other things, it draws comparisons between this much-beloved bicep-baring icon

and this more foreboding one:

I wonder if my daughter will feel the imperative to make herself strong without the threat of a looming apocalypse. I'll have to work hard to convince her that predatory dinosaurs are a real and present danger.

Maybe it would be enough incentive to be able to lift and be lifted in turn. I hope that my body holds up long enough for my daughter to be able to run some tough races with me. I'll gladly grasp her hand to lift her over walls. Maybe she'll even do it on her own, choosing the rewards of self-sufficiency. And maybe, when my own strength and youth are fading, she'll be strong enough to pick up the slack, and her hand will be the one reaching down for mine. Ah, so many metaphors to be mulled over as my daughter clings to my legs, a happy little hanger-on exclaiming, "You're so strong, daddy! I want to be strong like you!"