One day last August my husband and I took a walk in Gansevoort Peninsula Park and came upon the exercise station. We’d been spending our evenings on the sofa in awe watching teeny, hipless, shimmering Olympic gymnasts launch themselves into space and twist and somersault up there, and leap onto bars several stories high and spin with such velocity that surely the bars would snap in half.
For a civilian, I’m pretty fit; I lift weights, run, swim, carry my heavy Raleigh up and down my building’s stoop all the time. So I placed my unchalked hands on the orange chin-up bar and set about hoisting myself up.
You’ve got to be kidding, my muscles replied. I turned my palms the other way. Same response. I went over to the parallel bars, the friendliest of the scary gymnastic apparatuses in school. I placed my hands on the armpit-high bars and took a little jump to get up. Nothing doing, said my upper half.
Oh, the shame and disappointment! I was brought right back to my chubby childhood in the era of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. But I’m a grown-up now and I know some things. I decided I would keep coming back, building up my strength little by little. I promised myself to take this lightly, like a Buddhist, but not so much like me: small exertion every day, no attachment to the outcome.
“The Hudson is sparkling,” I wrote in my journal on August 10. “The air is no longer soup, the torsos are bare, the babies are sprinkler-giddy and I’m at the fitness station, having tried every day all week to do a chin-up. Hands gripping toward me or away? Who knows? Neither one gets me where I want to be: a mere foot off the earth. I bounce on the springy ground surface to build momentum, but I can’t hoist my own weight. Have faith, self. The body is a good student if you just get it to show up and make a daily effort.”
Google taught me the proper nomenclature. Pull-up: palms facing away and hands apart, which means your back does most of the work. Chin-up: palms facing you and hands closer together, which invites your biceps to help. Apparently both target the lats and pecs along with the brachialis, posterior deltoids, teres major, rhomboids and lower trapezius.
The body builders who frequent the station were generous with advice, most of it reinforcing what my buff younger son told me: just hang for a while to build grip strength. Don’t cheat by jumping up onto the lower of the two chin-up bars.
We went to Cape Cod for our annual vacation. I biked over to the elementary school and wahoo—two chin-up bars on the play structure in the yard!
I loved my new, solitary routine. Even in the total absence of measurable progress, it did have a zen-like quality. I was wide open to nature, the comic and the tragic: a Canada goose poop that formed a perfect arch on the blacktop, a dead rabbit by the side of Schoolhouse Road wearing a bandana that, on closer inspection, was its own dried blood.
Back home, another buff stranger told me that cheating is good: jump up on the low bar, stay as high and long as you can and slowly release yourself to the ground. A chin-down, it’s called. I slid right down like the squirrel I once saw trying to steal birdseed from a feeder atop a pole that had been greased.
I tried manifesting a chin-up, but the gap between the picture in my head and what my internal pulley system could achieve just discouraged me. I adjusted my routine, hoping I’d find one that made all the difference. Stretch first? Low bar or high bar first? Every day or build in “recovery” days?
Progress came in the usual way: when it seemed it never would.
I took to using the bars at the Jane Street pier’s playground, where the toddlers were busy mastering their own bodies; for reasons I couldn’t discern, I always felt stronger there than at the fitness station. I began to notice infinitesimal improvement. On good days, the world opened a crack and I walked home smiling. Now I could do deeper pushups, and the big cast-iron pan felt lighter. The hardest challenge has been sticking to my goal of not being goal oriented.
Puffy mittens
Then winter came, and it wasn’t kidding. Puffy mittens were necessary, but a hindrance. After each snowfall, the playground remained locked for days. I made do at the station, where I’d marvel at fitness bros doing pull-up sets as if their beefy-looking bodies weren’t filled with heavy organs and fluids. No progress on the chin-up or parallel-bar front. If anything, regression.
But then one day I could get right up on the parallel bars (a mount!) and stay for quite a while. Then I could swing my legs and hook my heels onto the bars in front of me the way I learned in elementary school: a micro-routine!
Another day when the playground was open, I jumped onto the low bar, got halfway to a chin-up as usual, but was able to stay for a few seconds. Needing to rest my arms but also wanting more, I walked to the station, where I found a woman hanging from the bar: a paisana! My doctor said it’s good for your discs, she said. No, wait, she added: my yoga teacher told me this. Just as good and maybe better, I replied, excited because hanging was no longer just remedial, it was a two-fer deal! I shared my accumulated chin-up wisdom and we exchanged first names. Darned if I didn’t start to notice how comfortable I felt in my own backbone.
I had hoped when I started this challenge last summer, I’d be holding my chin up high by now. I had hoped when I decided to write about it, I’d have a triumph to report in the final paragraph. Well, some stories are longer than others, and this one is still in development.
The playground is still locked, so now I admire the Hudson, which has frozen into giant lily pads of ice, each trimmed with a snowy border. Clouds roll in to the big sky and resemble other things. The Canada geese let me sidle up close enough to take notes toward poems about them. One day I have an insight: I prefer the playground because I’m closer to kid-size and the fitness station is designed—like so much of the world—for men; the bars are too big around for my hands.
One day between snows when the playground is open, a friendly dad and toddler, the sole occupants, greet me at the gate and (so they don’t think me a pervert) I explain my mission. Impressive, says the dad. Thanks, but not really, I reply, though I am proud of my increasing hang time and the new inch or so of lift I can sometimes achieve. I do my thing and wave goodbye. The dad calls after me: The first time I went for a run I could only do a half a mile.
I give him a thumbs-up. Boy are my thumb muscles strong.
