I'm embarking, with some reluctance, on a new endeavor: I'm trying to gain weight. That's new only in the sense that it's an active decision, rather than a simple default into slurping down whatever was too slow to escape my ravenous, gaping maw.

In some versions of mythical masculinity, men wake up and merely dust off the detritus of the previous night's manly activities before marching off to conquer the day. They have no use for cleansing, primping, tweezing, or painting – those are for women, who of course are expected to wake up flawless and smelling of roses. I'd like to believe that I don't care how I look, but of course I do – I'm just weird and insecure about it.

That's part of a pattern. Any activity in which I'm supposed to draw attention to myself ends up being a mixture of awkward and agonizing – dancing and public speaking are at the top of that list – and I often have a stress hangover for days afterward. Writing at least allows me to deposit my thoughts on a page and scuttle away before anyone notices, and promoting that is still a struggle. (You're all here for Joah rather than me, right?)

My parents wanted me to be a musician like them, but the cost-benefit of hours spent practicing in exchange for opportunities to climb on stage and cry was, let's say, unbalanced. Lifting heavy weights is fun. Progress is fun. Sharing powerlifting knowledge is fun. Supporting other lifters is fun. But actually being on the powerlifting platform, sometimes under bright lights, in front of strangers and cameras, isn't much better than public speaking. While some lifters like to interact with the crowd, I'd rather pretend it doesn't exist.

I don't like worrying about how I look. I hated going bald, but it at least freed me from the stress of deciding how to wear my hair. Joah loves to find excuses to get dressed up – and she looks amazing when she does – but I'd happily live in t-shirts and cargo shorts instead of thinking through what style dress is appropriate for which occasion.

Growing up as an awkward kid who needed “husky” sized pants and would reliably self-medicate after school with however much food was available, it would have been easy for me to have gotten really fat. I was recognized as big and strong beginning roughly in seventh grade, when I grew fast enough to become a head taller than most of my peers. I quickly plateaued, but some of them didn't catch up until after high school. As a geeky, self-conscious introvert, though, I was uncomfortable at best with standing out like that. Even the positive attention was beyond my capacity to accept gracefully, and some of the rest was simply corrosive, like the time a kid I'd never met wandered up to tell me, “You and me should fight.”

My strange little high school didn't have gym class. We instead had to participate in sports, which allowed the tiny student body to field terrible teams in a variety of competitions across every season. I wound up playing soccer in the fall, wrestling in the winter, and running track in the spring. But no matter how many calories I was burning on the soccer field, wrestling mat, or track, I would always eat more. Looking back, it's hard to fathom how I wasn't flabbier. Teenage metabolisms are a marvel.

When I reached college I dropped soccer and wrestling and and went from three competitive seasons to two, which, especially in the context of cafeteria dining with unlimited desserts at my disposal, probably increased the risk of getting fat. It may be that only a lack of interest in beer and a lack of funds for late-night pizza saved me from starring in a Free Willy sequel.

Not until after my relay team reached Division III NCAA Nationals did I find the motivation to do much off-season training. In retrospect it wasn't good or smart training, but its payoff was quick: I got lean and jacked. Finally I was out-working my appetite. I can only guess how other men might have responded to the sudden influx of attention, but here's what I did: I ignored it. I didn't linger in front of the mirror, and if there are any pictures of me from that time I have no idea where they might be. My dating life stayed dormant, my wardrobe bland and awkward, my diet questionable. “Fat kid” shame lingered like the scent of microwaved fish.

And that conditioning was short-lived. I've found my workout logs from the years after college. To say my training was stupid is like saying bricks make lousy calculators. Keeping a log was about the only thing I did right, and I was even less consistent about that than I was about the training itself. My abs suffocated beneath layers of pizza and ice cream, my muscles atrophied, my weight fluctuated. I could easily have been cast as a doughy sidekick. I tore a lot of pants.

It took a while for me to reach a comfortable place. First, I finally started getting to the gym consistently, which improved my self-esteem and hypertrophied some muscles that had long gone understimulated. (Enough that my wife-to-be noticed them!) Second, Joah's influence on my habits shouldn't be understated. Her determination to stay fit and eat healthfully helped me reject some of the sloth and gluttony that handicapped my earlier life.

Third, once I decided to compete as a powerlifter, I made the decision to drop weight. That's generally frowned upon for a first meet, for good reason, but I knew Joah would qualify for Nationals and that, given my strength and the qualifying totals, if I was going to compete beside her it had to be at 93kgs. Using some of what I'd picked up while researching the sport, I got lean again.

Powerlifting singlets are essentially identical to wrestling singlets but for the branding and IPF licensing fees; track singlets are only a little different. I'd worn both for years, albeit years and years ago, and it was easy not to think about wearing such thin fabric. I tried not to focus on how I'd look on the platform, and yet I purchased a solid-black singlet because I liked it more than the models with colored panels, and I chose my accessories to fit into the prevailing black-red-white palette of the sport.

I tried my singlet on only once before competing, to ensure that it fit, and that was not done in front of a mirror. Afterward it went into a drawer until the time came to pack my competition bag.

Because I knew pictures would be taken, I gave myself a fresh haircut and trimmed my beard, and I gave some thought to what shirt to wear under my singlet. I even showered (which may sound like it should go without saying, but do I have stories from high school wrestling . . . ). Most men aren't interested in meeting the the spray-tanned and tweezed standards of bodybuilding, but when the IPF changed its rules to require shirts under singlets for the deadlift, many mourned the lost opportunities to expose their arms. I always left my shirt on, but that too was an image-conscious choice.

Weight training got me attention even when I didn't have a barbell in my hands. “Are you a powerlifter?” asked the guy restocking the broccoli. “The Redskins need you,” said the old dude at the Washington-area gym. “Very nice physique, sir,” said the guy at the thrift store. “I want to be like you,” he added, as if the initial comment wasn’t awkward enough. Living as I do in downtown Pittsburgh and traveling as I do on foot, having some guy greet me with a hearty, “Hey, big man!” is almost a weekly occurrence. 

I have no idea how to respond to any of it, beyond offering a rote smile-and-nod or changing the subject. “Hello to you too, sir! What a fine gray day we're having. Go Steelers!”

Joah has witnessed this in its full form only once, when I was pulled aside for screening by the TSA. The agent assigned to pat me down, who made quite a show of the distress it would cause him to touch another man's groin, pronounced me “a very muscular gentleman.” When he asked me to pull up my shirt, he warned me that he wanted to see the top of my pants, “not the abs,” as if I wanted an opportunity to show off. (On another occasion a kid biking the opposite direction pronounced, “Damn, you bulky as hell,” but I think he was talking to Joah, not me.)

That fat kid shame and that awkward attention make an active effort to gain weight uncomfortable to contemplate. My history suggests that, while other people complain about losing weight if they stop lifting, I would instead blow up by about 20lbs. Gaining weight is what happens when I misbehave, not something to pursue.

Unfortunately, this “big man” may be too small. I want to look good with my shirt off, but focusing on that could hurt my strength. I've tended to weigh in well below the 93kg limit, and I'm tall for a 93kg competitor – closer to average for the 105kg or 120kg class. Adding 30 to 60lbs of mostly muscle is probably impossible, especially now that my beard is turning gray, and in the meantime I wouldn't be able to match the Nationals qualifying totals for the heavier weight classes. Most likely, massing up that much would require me to abandon any aesthetic goals without offering commensurate strength improvements.

For a lot of people, the image that “powerlifting” summons is of red-faced fat guys squeezed into spandex sausage casings, screaming and slapping each other whenever they aren't eating. When a friend of Joah's parents said she thought I'd be rounder, I assume that's what she had in mind. It makes sense, given that raw athletes tend to be leaner than those in equipped powerlifting, the form of the sport that dominated the previous four decades. There's some science supporting the idea that lean people who gain weight will add relatively more muscle than fat, but of course less-lean people will also add muscle, and it's impossible to draw bright lines between the groups. (Also, methods for measuring body fat percentages are highly unreliable on an individual basis and vary widely on a population basis.) All of that is to say that beyond an uncertain threshold, being lean isn't necessarily a good goal for a powerlifter.

The rate of weight gain is a challenge as well. A small increase in caloric intake is most likely to favor muscle growth over simply getting fat, but my weight tends to fluctuate too much to be certain what I'm accomplishing. The moment I have a cheat meal, my weight spikes, and I'm left with no idea of how much I should eat. For example, at the May meet I weighed in at less than 202lbs. Two days later, I weighed 211lbs. At NAPFs in August, I was less than 200lbs. A week later, I was up to nearly 214lbs. And both could have been far, far worse if I'd really wanted to go “bear mode.” Over the course of an average week of eating at a maintenance level (or as close to it as I can get), I might still vary by three or four pounds. It's a noisy system, and extracting the signal is a challenge.

Like everything else in powerlifting, adding muscle is going to be a slow process. I'm following the best research-based practices I can find, but it will be weeks or months before their results will be clear. In the meantime, maybe I can avoid getting my crotch patted down by the TSA.