At 5 a.m. it’s always dark in Northern California. No one wants to pound their coffee, hit the head, strap into workout gear, head to the car. No one wants to rush through the morning routine. But some do it. We do it.

The gym opens at 6 a.m. Work starts before eight for those who want to get ahead. 9 a.m. is for clock punchers. Nine is for losers—cope harder. The fountain of youth is sitting there inside a squat rack under a bar with 405 pounds on it. But instead of drinking the draught, you suck it in with the salt-sweat-flecked air of the gym as you rack the weight after the fifth rep, stepping away from the bar with your fingers locked behind your head, keeping your arms up to open your lungs. The secret to success is flat on your back staring up at 225 pounds and another guy sternly saying, “up, go time” at you, and you can feel just the hint of the mist of his spit hit your cheek as you raise your arms to lift up the weight.

Foolishness can pretend to be wisdom, and many are fooled. But weakness can never pretend to be strength.

But this isn’t how we’ve always lived. Five years ago, we were working our nor mal jobs. Clocking time and working out catch as catch can. When it was convenient. When we had time. Money, the silliest of all abstractions, was the primary concern. We were planning for the work meeting, making sure we hit our quarterly reports … amazing that such mundane concerns seemed so important. Then the rumor of the virus set in: China. The election campaign. Work sent an email asking everyone to stay home. Talking heads insisted that the public not panic. The work meeting was now on Zoom, and we were suddenly trapped in a tiny box, two inches square, sitting on our co-workers’ screens. Life became a TV show. Keep tuning in, or you’ll get canceled. Honestly, it beat sitting in traffic and then sitting in the meeting. In that way, we can be thankful—it exposed bull shit for what it was. It was nice to turn the volume down when the boss got dull. We saw what our spouse did for work and what the kids were doing at school. Or rather, what they weren’t doing at school. A confrontation with reality pulls even seasoned philosophers back from the brink.

It is possible to suspend judgment and imagine that high school sophomores can learn online. Maybe they could study more quickly than they could in a classroom. But the things we saw them miss burned. Imagine someone turning the volume down on your moment of triumph at recess in fifth grade, your first day of full-pads football practice, your first fumbling kiss at the Autumn Moondance. To rob youth of this—to rob old age of the hand of a loved one, held in the moment of death—it would take a saint to forgive this evil. Other signs set in that this was unsustainable. Inflation began to rise. Money, like time, is fleeting. But the health of the body, or the lack thereof, stays with us to the end. And as many men reported in that year, as you lose your body, you lose your mind. Aristotle knew we are hylomorphic beings. In an important and irreplaceable sense, you are your body.

And by the end of 2020, that year of abstraction from physical life, we were pain fully aware of it. All too often, working from home meant sitting at home. Eating at home. Drinking at home. Sleeping at home. Waking up at home to do it all again. The average American gained over 25 pounds that year.

A great many of those Americans woke up in 2021 and remembered who—and what—they were. I remembered my high school wrestling experience, dripping sweat in shorts and a T-shirt, learning how to “shoot.” To perform a shot you step forward into your opponent’s space. You step deeply enough that your toes are touching, you step behind where they are, assuming they’ll retreat. As you do this you change levels so that you get below their guard, even while you lean in, getting close to their body so they can’t push you away. The leg you do not step with has to either drag or sweep behind you. This causes drag on the knee as you rapidly try to pull that back leg into position in order to stand up with the other guy’s leg in your hands. I remember learning to drag that one leg behind me as I lunged deeply across a vinyl-covered foam mat. I practiced that move—penetration steps—until my knee hairs were pulled out at the roots, and I could shoot my single leg against any opponent. I remembered my leg, raw and sore, but I also remember being able to use my crafted body as a force in time and space, and by the end of my movement, I’d stand hefting the other guy’s leg in the air and snapping him to the ground. I wanted to return to my body.

Victor Freitas

Plato wrote philosophy, but Plato also wrestled. So I started hitting the gym again. In secret at first. Almost sneaking away from home to lift. The first day back at the gym is always embarrassing. You cannot fake being in shape. Foolishness can pretend to be wisdom, and many are fooled. But weakness can never pretend to be strength. The first day back, hanging from the bar after the only pull-up you can manage in the set, lifting the pathetically tiny dumbbell, and looking in the floor-to-ceiling mirror at an older man than you were in your memories of the gym in your youth. Human words, those abstractions, return unbidden to your mind: “I bid you come out before your doors and look abroad. Too long have you sat in the shadows and trusted twisted tales and crooked promptings… Breathe the free air again!” Just as Théoden grasped his sword, I returned to grasp, once again, those dumb bells. Bit by bit, strength and health returned. Lean, taut muscle gathered where the skin had sagged or ballooned. But what I gained was so much more than physical strength. I was sharper in lectures and seminars. An edge had returned.

But age comes with greater obligations. No man could gain this incredible benefit and refuse to share it with friends or those under his care. I encouraged my wife to exercise. I looked at my son, who was just a child when we had been locked inside.

“Your middle school has a weight room,” I told him one night. “Tomorrow, let’s go.”

It was just after 5 a.m. when I woke him up. Still dark outside. I had gotten up earlier to make eggs. I was already in workout gear; I was going there to lift, but I was also there to teach him. He blinked sleep out of his eyes as he ate. “Protein is essential if you’re serious about exercise. If you want to be huge you have to eat huge.” I signed up to help instruct, and as we walked in, there were ten or fifteen middle and high school boys, and a couple other fathers.

Form is imposed on matter in the gym. You move the weight in a particular way, not in any other. Hierarchy is established, and you find your measure in the community of the gym. You also find camaraderie. Everyone is pushing weight to find their limit; the weight, in a way, is a law for the flesh. After a punishing leg day, you are all brothers. At the end, we gather together for feedback.

“Too much talking today,” one father says, “you’re either here to get stronger or you’re not here. We don’t open this thing up before school for you to chitchat.”

“You’re either focused on moving the weights or you’re focused on your partner pushing them without letting them drop,” says another. “Feel your body, fuel your body.”

It comes to my turn to contribute the aphorisms I’ve learned in the dojo of the flesh: “You need goals. You need to know what you’re aiming for, or you’ll never achieve it.”

Men transmitting manhood to young men. We ask for a volunteer to pray, and a scrawny seventh grader raises his hand, and we bow our heads.

“Dear God, we thank you for giving us today, thank you for keeping us safe, and help us to have a good day. In Jesus’s name, Amen.” An earnest prayer he learned from Sunday school or his mother. A nice prayer. As we raise our heads, I look him in the eye. “In the future, you don’t pray for safety anymore, not here in the gym. We’re grateful for safety but we’re here to get strong. We’re moving dangerously heavy objects. We do it because out there,” I point at the door, “someone out there has to keep everyone safe. And someday that someone is going to have to be one of you. Your body is given to you, and it’ll be taken away from you someday. So,” I point at the ground, still breathing hard from our final plank, “in here you pray for glory. For a chance to do heroic deeds. Do you understand?”

Yes, Coach. The young boy nods and takes the stern reprimand manfully.

I shake his hand and clap him on the shoulder. “Alright. Get your bags and let’s clear out. We have to lock this room up before school starts.” I hold the door open as the young men file out and I turn to walk with my son as the light shines down from the heavens. Side by side with the sun on our faces, we enjoy the morning sky, prepared for the coming day.

Colin Redemer is managing director at Beck & Stone, Director of Education at American Reformer, a professor at St. Mary’s College of California. He serves as a board member for the Classic Learning Test.