Every Rep Counts: Fatherhood, Rehab & Strength - Episode V: Morning Light

Episode IV ended beside the cot, with another quiet rep done. But the thing about quiet reps is that they don’t stay finished for long. Morning comes around, the baby wakes up, the shoulder reminds you it’s still there, work starts tapping its watch, and the whole circus starts again.

Moonshadow

I’ve got the best alarm clock in the world. She’s called Lucy.

Up before dawn, completely oblivious to the drama she’s caused Mum and Hairy Boobless Mum overnight. For such a small thing, she takes up a surprising amount of room … particularly when she sleeps in the ‘T’ formation, arms outstretched like a tiny cricket umpire signalling a wide, somehow claiming more mattress than the two adults responsible for keeping her alive.

Tomorrow had arrived, whether I was ready for it or not. I drew back the main curtain, and it was still dark outside. But, through the gloom, I could see the outline of the shed that houses our gym.

“Tonight,” I said to myself.

I'd said that before.

Many times.

Sometimes it was true. Sometimes the day got away from me. Sometimes work took more than it was supposed to, Lucy took more than I’d realised, and by the time the house finally went quiet, the idea of getting out to the gym just felt like my brain was trying to prank my body.

But I still said it.

"Tonight."

There's Beauty in the Breakdown

At a superficial level, powerlifting and parenting look pretty similar. On the one hand, all you have to do is lift heavy weights, and on the other hand, all you have to do is keep this tiny human alive. They both appear deceptively simple on paper. Lift thing up, put thing down, with the only difference being how much the thing you’re lifting wriggles and dribbles.

But, once you look a little deeper, it starts to look like one of those fractal things. There is a distinct kind of madness in realising that the deeper you go, the further away the finish line appears to get. Your shoulder finally allows you to progress to using the normal barbell on bench press, only for your wrists and elbows to start aching because they haven’t had to do anything like this in a year and a half.

Or, you finally get Lucy to sleep in her own cot beyond midnight again, only for a new developmental leap to completely rewire her brain and rewrite the rules of sleep … again. The fractal never ends; it is an overwhelming, exhausting loop of continuous troubleshooting.

But, if you step back and blink through the fatigue, it is also an absolute wonder to behold.

There is an undeniable beauty in how complex it all is. The human body’s ability to heal, adapt, and find a way to stand up under a heavy barbell again after an injury is nothing short of spectacular. Watching a tiny, chaotic human slowly decode the world in real time is breathtaking. You’re buried in the messy, grinding, micro details of everyday survival, yet you are simultaneously looking at a masterpiece.

Or, you know, it could just be the severe sleep deprivation talking, and tomorrow I’ll just see a pile of dirty baby clothes soaking in a bucket, and a very humbling bench press session. But right now, that fractal is magnificent.

The Static Age

Even though the fractal is impressive, it can only paper over the cracks for so long.

Kids these days, and probably a fair chunk of the adults as well, will never get to experience the ‘joys’ of getting an audio, or a video tape for that matter, which had been handed around and copied amongst a friendship group, with each new copy getting progressively worse and worse until the static became the lead track.

That’s kind of what it feels like sometimes, when you have to divvy up a very finite resource.

You start to feel like a half-arsed partner, a half-arsed Hairy Boobless Mum, a half-arsed employee, a half-arsed rehab patient, and just a half-arsed Paul in general.

Nothing ever feels like it gets the amount of Paul that it warrants, and Paul is left with nothing of himself at the end of each day. Or at the very best, a second, third, fourth-hand tape recording.

There’s that tug of war between wanting to stay, and needing to leave. The guilt of going, the frustration of needing income and structure, that weird feeling of being semi-useful at work, while falling behind at home. Then, when you’re finally home, there’s the equally weird feeling of being present and semi-useful there, but falling behind everywhere else.

This isn’t because you don’t care. It’s because you care deeply about all of it, but you just don’t know how to make it all work.

Leaps and Bounds

Every now and then, there would be a truce in the tug of war, and a possible future would start to shine through. Lucy and I started to develop a little morning routine, if there even is such a thing. It began simply as her nuzzling into me while we both tried to ignore the fact that the room was getting lighter.

Then, as we both got stronger, Lucy would do ‘Tummy Time’ on my chest. She’d flail around, squawk, grab handfuls of chest hair, dribble, have the occasional spew, and generally treat me like a warm, hairy activity mat.

One morning, during one of those little chest-based hijinks sessions, she had a small ‘reversal’. I lifted her up off my chest slightly to assess the damage, and my brain quietly said:

“Hmm. That didn’t hurt.”

So, just like I’d been doing with some of my really basic rehab exercises, I lowered her back down and tried a very short-range chest press. I’m only talking forearm height off my chest, with my elbows still safely bent at about 90 degrees and tucked into my sides. Nothing heroic. Nothing video-worthy. But it was a start.

And perhaps more importantly, like most babies being gently launched into the air, Lucy basically lost her shit and absolutely loved it.

The rehab exercise I was basing it on only had me doing two sets of about five reps, so I swapped it out for mini chest press aeroplanes with Lucy.

Win, win!

It was one of those “Oh yeah, I did that without even thinking, and nothing hurts” moments. Not a PB. Not a milestone anyone else would care about. But to me, it was huge.

Not long ago, this shoulder couldn’t be trusted with much more than an empty bottle. Now, it was helping me make my daughter laugh. And these days, I can do as many chest press aeroplanes with Lucy as she’ll tolerate.

Leaps and bounds.

The Magic Door

Other parents will get what I’m about to say here; but how hard is it to leave for work in the morning, when all you want to do is stay home with your little family?

Especially when the babies learn how to smile, and wave, and they have some sense that you have gone out through that magic door and won’t come back through it until it’s almost time for them to go to bed again.

It’s like you’re breaking an ancient code that stretches as far back into our human evolution as you can imagine.

I see you nodding ...

But that is countered by the knowledge that they’ll be waiting for you when you come back through the magic door. Anna, who has carried her own version of the day, and Lucy, who still somehow has the power to look surprised and delighted that you exist.

And that smile of recognition you get is worth … I dunno, you can’t really put a price on it. Helen of Troy allegedly had the face that launched a thousand ships, but Lucy’s is the one that gets me home.

There is an emotional cost of trying to serve all of these different worlds, and being caught up in all that complexity often feels like failure.

But maybe I wasn’t actually half-arsing everything?

Maybe I was, and still am, learning how to divide one whole person across too many important things, whilst trying not to completely disappear from any of them?

Seven Worlds Will Collide

I’m starting to find places where the different versions of me overlap, or in some cases, crash into each other. There was no big “Aha!” moment. Things just changed, got better, became easier to work with.

A perfect example is that on my training nights now, after Lucy has had her tea and her bath, I scoop her up and we head out to the gym. And the best part? We use that exact same ‘magic door’ to go out to the gym together. The same door I walk through when I leave for work, feeling like I’m breaking that ancient code, is also the one I carry Lucy through on training nights.

Same door, different version of Paul, the Hairy Boobless Mum version, and it becomes our gateway to a shared playground. It started as an idea one night to try and tire Lucy out before bedtime, and now it has become our little thing.

The days of putting her in a bouncer, or on a play mat, while I did some rehab work are long gone. She’s fully mobile now, free-ranging across the platform, and under the squat racks, like a chaotic little wizard, clothed in a onesie and a dressing gown. This is play time!

For half an hour or so, me, Wizard Lucy, and whoever else is in the gym, turn this space into another corner of her expanding world. She toddles around the gym, pointing at things, picking things up, putting them down, climbing, or at least trying to climb things that she perhaps shouldn’t, testing her own boundaries, and just luxuriating, sometimes quite loudly, in the pure joy of movement.

It hits me that as I’m rebuilding one of my joints so that I can keep up with her, Lucy is building her world from scratch right next to my barbell. And we are both just trying to figure out how our bodies work in this space, albeit from opposite ends of the process. The shapes are familiar – pressing, bracing, squatting down, standing back up, lifting, lowering – but none of my rehab programs had little wizards trying to use the bumper plates as giant teething rings.

And then like a flash, play time is over and it’s time for bed. So, I hoist Lucy up onto my shoulders, and make sure to squat down a bit so I don’t clonk her head as we go back through the magic door, for night-nights. Anna is in charge of bedtimes on my training nights, so before my brain has a chance to prank my body again, I head back out to get under the bar.

Tonight, Tonight

Back out that magic door. The one that used to separate one life from another was now joining them together.

And tomorrow morning, when I look out the window towards the gym shed in the gloom, I won’t just see a place of heavy things and lonely rehab. I’ll see our playground, and I’ll say to myself with a smile and growing anticipation:

“Tonight.”

Because every rep counts. Even the ones where you don’t lift a single weight, and just watch a tiny wizard command a room full of iron.

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