Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Five - Part One

     Chapter Five - Part One.


          I've often felt too small, especially when I was a teenager. At school or in the street, many men and some women towered over me. To-day I stand fully grown at five feet six inches or 1.65 metres high. I wanted to be bigger, stronger and tougher. In my late teens I took up weight training. As a result, my weight ballooned from 135 pounds to close to 175. I didn't grow up. I grew out.
    Yet my weight training alas, damaged my legs. I pumped out repetitions with weights for my arms, legs,  shoulders and chest. Yet my knees took the bruunt of damage from lifting weights.
     At the local Y.M.C.A. weight room on Burrard Street I sweated while trying to pump up my thighs. I would hold a weight on my shoulders while bending my knees. I did this while the heels of my shoes rested on a plank of wood.
    "You're going to kill your knees doing this," one of the many weight lifters at the Y.M.C.A. gym told me. "I'd stop doing that if I was you."
     I ignored this advice. All through the 1960's to the mid-1970's, I kept squatting with weights while my heels rested on a wooden block. To make matters worse, in 1974 I took up jogging. John was a tall muscular brown haired 40- something man I met in the 'Y' weight training gym on Burrard Street. He would lift weights and then work out on the gymnastic bars in a gym upstairs from the weight room. The weight room sat in the 'Y' building's basement.
    I saw John do jogging too. So then I took up jogging. Meanwhile I would often run into John when he would stalk back downstairs into a tiny room beside the weight room. Here. a huge punching bag hung from this small room's ceiling. John would then punch this bag with a manic intensity, sometimes for over half an hour at a time. His sweaty smell soon filled up the room which had no windows.
     I looked on at John's punching workouts, half-fascinated, half-repelled. "That John is not a bad guy," another weight trainer told me. "But sometimes I've seen him act kind of strange." I ignored this comment and became friends with John who was then in his mid 40's. A former logger and construction worker, he lived in a tiny basement room not far from where I lived in Kitsilano.
      "You and me are just fig leafers," John said about his and mine weight training. "We're just trying to look good. We're not tough." And as he said the word "tough" his face would sometimes shake to emphasize the word. I kept on jogging though I couldn't keep up with John in his jogging workouts. I was truly hurting my knees by jogging and doing squats in my peculiar way. I was heading for a fall. It came soon enough.