Starting Strength Taught Me To Be A Creep

Thanks Mark Rippetoe…

So the other day we had deadlifts in the strength portion of our workout. Being away from heavy lifting for a while made these sets of deads a bit uncomfortable. After these past few years, I’ve pretty much built up the muscle memory to just get in that zone and rip the bar off the floor. So the other day, I was off with my form and overall vibe. I actually had to think of some details regarding form to lift that bar.

According to Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength:

If the floor is your gaze point, look about 10 feet in front of you.

I’ve been following that since I read the book 3 years ago, so of course, I was going to do that. However, it doesn’t help when something else is in that same vicinity of your gaze.

Sure, she can’t see me staring at her ass, but I’m sure the people next to me would notice. And you know those random things that girls can just sense? I feel she’d know I was looking at her ass.

What was I supposed to do? I thought I was pretty far in front of the class, but since it was pretty packed, she set her bar up around 10 feet ahead of me. For realz? I had no choice but to just go along with things and focus. Ha! Focus…for my first warmup sets, my mind was thinking of lots of different things, so luckily I wasn’t pulling anything heavy.

I’m not complaining. Oh not at all…it’s just that…I wanted to get some decent lifts in without hurting myself, especially since these were my first deadlifts in over a month.

But all I could think of was ass.

Fortunately, we were alternating between deads and another lift, so everyone ended up lifting at different times. Phew. I was able to view that area of the floor 10 feet away from me in peace.

But all I could think of was ass.

By my last set, I was in the zone, ripping that bar off the floor in good form with my back safe. I was really happy hitting 325# for a set of 2. Next time I’ll definitely beat my 2 rep PR of 335# as long as my back is healthy. I have a tendency to really strain my back with really heavy or high rep deads. That’s why I’m always cautious with this lift.

Finally, I got all those dirty thoughts out of my head. Then I realized…shit. We have an AMRAP with SDHP’s…and she’s still in front of me. The first 9 seconds of this song came to mind:

I just couldn’t resist a few times during that AMRAP…