Working Out

(by Pien Huang)

We work out from 4-4:30. First the Boatswain, then the 2nd Mate, then me. We complete three cycles each, isolating the biceps one day, and the chest the next; back, shoulders and triceps come later. The bench and the weights are in a cozy den. But the hatch opens to a private deck, and we bench looking onto the ocean.

We're on the “Endothil” program, minus the supplements, Jim’s program where we max out on each set. The two of them do, at least. They watch me carefully, pushing me, spotting me. "One more," Jim yells. "I lied. Another one!" But when I say stop, it is enough.

Jim is the motivator. "Let's go, Big Joe," he shouts. “No pain, no gain.” When he's up, his grunts are heard on the science deck. At first, I make the mistake of helping him count. Joe puts his fingers to his lips. "He likes to count double sometimes," he says. "Like seven, seven."

There’s always the Lebanese tape playing in the background. It cuts short of the workout, so we pause twenty minutes in to turn it around. The tape is Joe’s. It is one of the few physical things he has picked it up in his myriad travels; the rest exist in memory, as stories and photographs. There is a picture of Joe posted on the wall, sporting a cowlick and a leopard-print thong. “For motivation,” he laughs. He fell briefly into male-modeling in Mexico. He was a movie extra in China, where his character was killed off by a prosthetic elephant trunk. Eventually, he wants to settle in Colombia.

Jim’s favorite is tricep day. When I struggle on my fifth rep, he shouts, “Come on, now! No arm flab in the future!” Working out is always personal for him. He talks himself up and beats himself down. “I said I can’t,” he yells. “I should never say I can’t!” But the next moment, he is philosophical. “No pain no gain,” he says, bouncing lightly, taking jabs. “We’re like gorillas!”

He deflects on cardio day, smoking cigarettes while Joe and I jog laps on deck. We can only run on half the deck, and the rest of the loop is spent walking around cables and scientific equipment, climbing up and down stairs. Even so, I am winded by the third lap. We take a break, stretching in the salt spray, looking at the birds. “I was going crazy,” Joe shouts over the clamor of the engines. “I had to go outside.” He got serious about working out when he hit thirty last year. He is teaching himself Spanish, by workbook and podcast. In his off-time, he reads Borges.

My arms are sore, but they yield a satisfying firmness. They insist that the regimen builds tone instead of bulk. Even so, I'm told that I'll be benching more than my weight when we're through. Joe lends me his Buddha Balm, a tingling salve from Cambodia. “The scientists aren’t this much fun, are they?” he asks.