I love to lift heavy weights, and I have loved lifting since I was a teenager. I first took an elective weightlifting class in my sophomore year in high school. I don't know what I was thinking, or why I decided to try something rather foreign to me. Up to then I had been a runner and a biker. Why weightlifting? It's not like I knew anyone who lifted. Why not aerobics or jazzercise? And not many girls then could be found in an elective weightlifting class...in my case, just me and two bored girls who were taking the class to be with their football team boyfriends.
After this, I joined a gym and learned to not care how many guys were working out in the free weight area. A lot of women, and probably men too, are intimidated by the big beefy sweaty guys strapping on belts and grunting. But I had my training from coach Big Belly. I had my books. I'd watched Pumping Iron. I read Muscle and Fitness magazine. That gym was my natural habitat, too, even if it didn't feel natural yet. The trick was to keep showing up and lifting. Eventually the male lifters accepted me and just went about their business while I went about mine. Ahhhh, gym symbiosis.
Each time I change gyms there's that time between being the only woman in the free weight room (glaring at the guy using my squat rack for shrugs) to becoming just another person working out, to becoming almost invisible to the other lifters -- accepted but different. Gorillas in the gym, indeed.
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