Heavy Circles

I don’t do well without structure. When I’m working 40 hours a week, I am obsessively disciplined in my weight and cardio routines. You might think with more time on my hands, I’d be all the more diligent. Nope. I lose the plot swiftly. I feel very busy but accomplish nothing. I put off working out, I don’t get any writing done, and then I dwell on it. It’s a downward spiral from there. I’ve been in that space for the last few months as I flit from job to job, trying to find a fit.

I think a lot of creative personalities have this problem. My mind is not a safe place to wander; there are tarpits and tiger traps. Left to my own devices, I get like Martin Sheen in that opening salvo of Apocalypse Now, wandering around in my underwear, arguing with imagined foes, peering through the blinds and muttering angrily, paranoid that I’m getting fat and weak while Charlie’s getting stronger in the jungle. And that last part is not far from the truth. I’ve lost a step in the physique department, and I’ve got to find a way back.

Thankfully, I’ve now got a 40 hour/week job, plus a side hustle. I’ll be busy as a one-armed paper-hanger for the foreseeable future, so it’s time to find that place of discipline again.

I had two things that knocked me off my game. They aren’t good excuses, just rational explanations. I had my Achilles tendon burst while I was in a Taekwon-Do tournament in May of ’24 (a story worthy of its very own entry). And while I was recovering and rehabilitating that injury, I lost my corporate sponsorship.

In my last two corporate comms roles, I had executive class gym memberships included with my employment, and even when I didn’t, the exorbitant salaries of oil and gas employees allow one to spend the $50 biweekly to enjoy fancy machines and towel service without a second thought. Working in retail and moonlighting as a security guard does not support this extravagance.

I needed an economical way to expand my home gym, which consisted of one bar and only about 50 lbs. of assorted weights. I looked both online and at garage sales, but people have gotten wise to the value of steel plates. Time was, you could go pick up dad’s old weight set at an estate sale for 30 bucks. Not anymore. People know that they can get a dollar per pound now. So a little dumbbell with two 10 lb. plates on each side will run you $40, and that’s not much weight.

The price of lifting at home gets higher and higher the stronger you are. If I’m going to workout, I need to be able to make a pair of dumbbells that I can adjust between 80 and 100 lbs. apiece. So that’s $200 if I could just buy what I needed, but that’s not how garage sales or Facebook Marketplace work. You more likely wind up spending $600 on several sets of weights just to get what you need. I saw some lovely steel on Marketplace, the standard dollar per pound, but I’d have to buy some of those plastic weights filled with chalk to get them. Those plastic things are useless to anyone lifting heavy. They’re not dense like steel, so there’s no bar long enough to put any significant weight on it. You could fully load a bar and still only hit 150 lbs.

So I went to a friend of mine who’s a pipefitter, and I told him that I really need some heavy circles. Weightlifting is just the repeated displacement of heavy circles, usually this is a vertical displacement, or it can be horizontal if pulleys are involved. The heavier the circle or group of circles displaced, the more successful the lifting session. Pipefitters work with heavy circles all day long.

I gave him some dimensions and weight requirements, and he found some scrap materials and welded up two versatile, adjustable heavy circle holders. There’s a thing called a flange. He explained what it does, but I forgot before he even finished. I was just impressed that they are circular, varied in size, and very heavy.

He even made collars for me. These are the pieces that keep the plates from falling off. He found some mini flanges and threaded them to spin onto the ends of the dumbbells.

I thought about giving them a paint job, but I sort of like the Frankenstein-esque look of the things. I told him that he could make the minimum weight around 70 to 80 lbs. so he welded the big flanges right to the bar. You can see the scorch marks where he did it.

There’s no way to even know exactly how heavy these boys are. I stood on a scale with and without each piece to get a rough idea. Though it’s a digital scale, I’d say the accuracy is probably only good to within a pound or two with this method. Best guess, I can strip them right down to 48 lbs. and get them loaded up to 98 lbs. (the latter being plenty for this guy).

I’d love to give a shoutout to my man who built these for me. It was generous, thoughtful, and (even more importantly) brilliantly executed. However, these flange thingies are raw material where he works, and he appropriated them as “scrap.” Now, he tells me they were not prime material headed for their designated use, but they also weren’t exactly on the midden heap. They were in the quasi state of being a legit company asset, but not being something anyone would miss either.

So I can’t say that my heavy circles are 100% ethically sourced, but given the lengthy and shameful supply chains that reach North America… what is? Regardless, here’s a big shoutout to my good friend Crush (a Dungeons & Dragons character name that allows me to leave him anonymous), my generous artificer of heavy circles. Thanks, buddy!