Spoilers below!
I’ve written a lot about my (sometimes separate, sometimes not) journeys with running and my weight. I’ve given both of these topics a lot of thought, publicly and privately, so I was immediately hooked by the first chapter of this book, where the author talked about how her thinking about running and her body had become unhealthy. I was especially struck by her anecdote about not feeling that she had “earned” a pastry after running a half marathon, and how this experience eventually led to her re-examining her relationships with sport and body image.
Around this same time, I was also excited to get back into lifting heavy weights. I was just starting to squat with heavy weights early last year, but had to stop when I got pregnant. After getting pregnant, I signed up for a half marathon as soon as I was cleared for exercise, and the training monopolized my exercise routine for a few months. As soon as I was done with that race, it had been nearly a year since I stopped lifting, and I was excited to jump back in!
With all of this in mind, I was especially excited to read about the author’s journey from runner to weightlifter, but ultimately left disappointed.
Firstly, by the end, I did not have a great grasp of what the author was trying to convey with the book overall. After reading it, I learned that the author had previously written columns and contributed articles to various news organizations, and it finally clicked – the book read like a series of articles and columns. There did not seem to be one connecting theme or throughline among the chapters other than weightlifting, and the transitions between them sometimes felt disjointed or forced. In one chapter, she lightly links an anecdote about a bad lift to a bad date, who never gets mentioned again; in another, she makes another tenuous connection to a strained relationship with her father. It felt like the author was trying to use weightlifting as a platform to tell the entire story of her life, with mixed results.
Second, and this may have just been me, but I was not sure what I expected to get out of the book, which ultimately hindered my ability to enjoy it. Did I want a weightlifting manual? Probably not, and this definitely was not that. Did I want inspiration? Maybe, but it was hard to get it here when the story jumped around so much. Did I want someone to just tell me what I wanted to hear? Don’t we all?
By the end, the author was competing in a weightlifting competition, and I was conflicted – while I felt the excitement and anticipation, I also did not feel like I understood the effort and struggle and work that went into that day – and shouldn’t that have been the point?
Trisha Serquina 