The Seniors
As I’ve mentioned before, I was first allowed to venture into my high school’s weight room during the spring of my eighth grade year. This was a huge moment for me, and I remember being super nervous and excited. I was always beanpole skinny, and by the end of eighth grade I was probably 6’1” and maybe 150 pounds. Sure I had been playing sports my whole life, but lifting weights and barbell training was very new to me and my baseline strength was minimal.
There are huge differences between a 13 year old kid and a 17-18 year old senior in high school. All of the seniors seemed so big, strong, and jacked and there names were on all the weight room boards showing that they had squatted 400, benched 300, cleaned 250, etc. It seemed like they were all squatting three or four plates and benching and power cleaning at least 275. These were the guys we watched play varsity football on Saturday afternoons in the fall. They were like gods to us.
One day my freshman year I walked into the weight room and saw one of the senior guys doing pull-ups on the bar at the top of one of the squat racks. He was alternating reps between getting his chin over the bar to the front with pulling himself up to the back of his neck, and he was making his 10 rep set look damn easy. Two of the outstanding female athletes at the school were in another rack squatting 225 for reps. I knew that, in more ways than one, I did not look that good squatting 225. The school’s star running back was against the wall stretching out, getting ready for a squat session that would include multiple sets of 405 and above. An amazingly stout and rugged middle linebacker was doing power cleans with 275, snapping the weight up to his chest like it was an empty barbell. A pair of brothers who were both savage wrestlers were blasting an arm workout using an “I go, you go,” format. I distinctly remember thinking that one of them looked exactly like a caveman except he was lifting dumbbells instead of huge rocks or freshly killed mastodon carcasses. Another senior guy, a linebacker and wrestler who was known as a bit of a loose cannon, was benching on the other side of the weight room. This guy was known for screaming obscenities when executing a heavy lift. You’d be in the middle of a set or spotting your training partner and you’d hear this guy scream, “MOTHERFUCKING COCKSUCKER!” Of course everyone would laugh and a coach might yell at us for the foul language, but nobody really cared.
Mr. Madigan was, fittingly, the ringleader of all this chaos. He would walk around the weight room wearing an old leather weight belt and nodding his head to AC/DC’s “The Jack" and screaming at people to get after it. When someone was attempting a personal record or going for a lift to get their name on one of the boards, Mr. Madigan would yell, “New recorrrrrrrrrrd!” and everyone would gather around to watch the lifter. This was a gut check for a young lifter like myself because I certainly didn’t want to screw up, miss a lift, or look stupid in front of the senior guys and girls. Mr. Madigan deserves his own blog post on here, but I may have to wait a little bit until he retires from teaching. For now, I’ll just say he was crazy, but he also motivated the hell out of me, got me started in learning physics, and played a huge role in getting me to where I am today. His “one for Iron Mountain” mantra still rings in my ears when I’m at the end of a tough set trying to eek out one more rep. It’s worth noting that AC/DC Live was the only CD in the corner radio boombox for about five years until my buddy Poike made a mixed CD featuring Bon Jovi, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Black Sabbath, and, of course, AC/DC.
No matter how old I get or how many different lifters or gyms I come across, those seniors from my high school will always seem Herculean in stature and cooler than Fonzi. They are frozen in time in what for many was surely their peak jacked-ness. Their lifting and attitudes inspired my friends and me to push ourselves and get better. The best part is that in some ways, they still inspire me to keep improving so that one day I might be as big, strong, jacked, and cool as they were back in the late ‘90s.