Not long ago, an old friend of mine posted some information on the internet about using barbell exercises to strengthen and rehabilitate an athlete who had a severe problem with scoliosis. The story he posted was under the title "The healing power of the barbell."

That title caught my eye because it made me think about something from my own personal history in the iron game. When I first glanced at the words "the healing power of the barbell," I initially thought about the ways in which a person can be healed. Obviously, most of us think about healing in the context of injury recovery. We strain connective tissue, pull muscles, and tweak our bodies in a variety of different ways when we’re fighting for bigger lifts and greater strength. Then our physiology has to heal and repair itself after these traumas. It’s part of the game, nothing new to anybody.

However, that title took my brain in another direction. Aside from physical aspect of it, I couldn’t stop thinking about the idea of being healed in other ways. We go through times when we’re frustrated or discouraged from lack of progress. We also experience defeats, either on the competition platform or in the bigger contest venue known as life. Some people walk through their lives carrying around scars and baggage from early experiences that were almost impossible to deal with in a positive way. And the thing we all have in common is that we all look for ways to heal ourselves after we’ve gone through hell. Some people pick destructive paths such as substance abuse or criminal activity because it seems like it will erase the pain, at least for a little while. Some people adopt pets. Some people learn to play a musical instrument. Some people submerge themselves in their professions or their relationships, thinking that constant focus on a certain area will eliminate any focus on the other areas that are difficult and depressing. Then, some people simply become bitter and vengeful because they want to build a brick wall around their soul and never give anybody else a chance to cause damage.

How does all of this connect to barbells? Seriously, how does all the Dr. Phil-type discussion lead us to a place where we can get some useful information out of this month’s issue of The Performance Menu? Well... let me say a few words about that.

I love the 90s...

Aaahhh, 1998... I was twenty-six years old and at the top of my weightlifting game. My first Olympic weightlifting competition was in 1990. After spending a few years fumbling around in training and getting limited results, I decided to take this weightlifting thing all the way. I packed everything I owned into my 1981 Chevy Malibu station wagon, left my home in sunny Arizona, and drove up to rainy Washington so I could train for the legendary Calpian Weightlifting Club and be coached by John Thrush, the best weightlifting coach in America. The next five years of my life were brutal as I fought the weightlifting wars and attempted to work my way up the national rankings. Frustration? Plenty. Plateaus? Several. Best years of my athletic life? Absolutely, jack.

Things started to pay off around 1997 because I moved up to superheavyweight from the 105 kilo class and my lifts shot up like a rocket. My breakout meet was the 1997 American Open in St. Joseph, Missouri where I snatched 150 and clean and jerked 180 for the first time, weighing under 120 kilos. For the next year and a half, I continued making progress and consistently won medals at all the top national meets in the United States. Times were fun. As H.I. McDonnough once said, they were the salad days.

However, lifting big weights and winning medals were only pieces of the entire puzzle. One of the best parts of being on the national weightlifting circuit was the friendships and bonds you formed with other lifters from around the country. This was always one of the elements of the lifting world that I loved the most. Even though one lifter lived in Florida and another lifter lived in Michigan and they only saw each other three or four times a year at national meets, it still felt like family. Everyone was around the same age, and the connection we all had through the sport we loved was an extremely tight link. I’ve always considered weightlifting a tribal sport, and being members of the tribe that competed at all the big meets made us brothers, sisters, cousins, and so on.

During these years, I ran with a crowd of lifters that liked to train hard and play hard. We were not choir boys. Maybe we would have been better weightlifters if we had played by the rules and spent all our post-competition time sitting in our hotel rooms and writing out our new weightlifting goals on Embassy Suites stationery, watching a Sandra Bullock movie and treating ourselves to a nice bowl of ice cream. I don’t know for sure. What I do know for sure is that we liked going to bars, we liked drinking beer, we liked female companionship, we liked being young and strong, and we liked pushing the limits of safe, socially appropriate behavior. I’m surprised we didn’t all grow up to become United States Congressmen.

One of my closest friends during this time was a lifter from Sacramento named Greg Johnson. Greg, like me, was a former football player-turned weightlifter and I think it’s safe to say that he and I were sculpted from the same block of cheese. Along with Coach Bill Kutzer and a great pack of fellow weighlifters, Greg built the Team Sacramento Weightlifting Club from the ground up. Throughout the late 90s, Team Sac was consistently an impressive power at the national level. Their men’s and women’s teams were competitive, and the overall personality of their group was a lot like the Calpians. They had a coach who was a very good man and wanted nothing but the best for his lifters, who he treated like his own kids. They had a gang of athletes who trained hard, and they showed a noticeable enthusiasm and positive team attitude in all the things they did. We competed in all the same meets, we partied together, and we grew very close. Greg even had family in Washington State, so we would often see him a few times a year when he came to our gym to train while visiting. Although we lived in different areas, I considered Greg a brother in iron.

We all went through the salad days together. Down in the Sacramento area, Greg lifted, coached, and directed local meets that were fun and intense. Up in Washington, I did exactly the same thing with my club. The world was our oyster, and then things changed.

Losses...

As Jim Morrisson once said, "The future is uncertain and the end is always near."

On July 24th, 1999, I dislocated my knee during a 187.5 clean and jerk at a local meet in Auburn, Washington. It was less than a year before the 2000 Olympic Trials, which had been the ultimate goal of my career. Hell, it was the ultimate goal of my life. Weightlifting was practically my entire reason for breathing. I don’t know if it was healthy or balanced to look at the world this way, but being a lifter was the most important thing in my existence. The Trials were around the corner, I was in the best shape of my life, and it was obvious from my training that much bigger lifts were about to fall. Now, I should mention that our 2000 Olympic Team consisted of only two men (who turned out to be Oscar Chaplin and Shane Hamman), and I knew I wasn’t going to be in the mix for the top spots to go to Sydney. I was at 155/185 with the potential to maybe hit around 160/195, which clearly wasn’t serious Olympic contention. But it didn’t matter to me because from the time I first became a weightlifter, I knew that having the chance to compete in the Trials was a sacred honor that separated you from the pack in our sport, even if you didn’t make the Olympic Team. I wanted it so bad, I couldn’t stand it.

Then, when I had that 187.5 jerk over my head and I felt the bones in my knee separate, I knew it was all in jeopardy. It was a bad injury. After getting the MRI and speaking with a top surgeon, my options were clear. If I had surgery to repair the damage, I would be looking at almost a year of rehab. Or, I could skip the surgery and try to get back to my top lifts through strengthening the joint and physical therapy. The only choice I had to possibly make the Trials was option #2, clearly, so I skipped the surgery and started training again as soon as I could.

To make a long story short, I didn’t get back to my top lifts after the injury and the 2000 Trials passed me by. My discouragement and disappointment were extreme, to say the least. In fact, I had practically decided to get out of Olympic weightlifting by 2001 because I couldn’t stand the frustration. I spent the next three years squatting and deadlifting in the gym, only because I couldn’t imagine my life without lifting weights. But there was no real focus, no real hope. I resigned myself to the idea that competing in the Olympic Trials was just something I was going to have to let go. This realization was like acid in my mouth, and I didn’t handle it well at every given moment.

Then, the universe provided one of those moments when you snap to attention and look at everything just a little bit differently. I had been in the middle of a three-year pity party for myself when I woke up one day and found out that my old friend Greg Johnson, who I had continued to keep in touch with outside of weightlifting, had been killed in a car accident in early 2003.

It’s an understatement to say Greg’s death was an immensely painful blow to everyone who knew him. The news of his passing hit us like a hammer to the chest. He had a young son, he had recently been given a strength coaching position at Stanford University, and his hard work on the local weightlifting scene in California had nourished the sport in a valuable way. It was difficult for all of us to comprehend how such a bright light in the weightlifting world could be snuffed out so early. I think there are many people out there who still haven’t come to terms with Greg’s loss. It certainly made me ask some questions about life that I still don’t know if I’ve found an answer for.

And a few months after it happened, his Team Sacramento family showed their typical classy character by announcing that there would be a Greg Johnson Memorial weightlifting meet in Sacramento in August of 2003. Just as Greg would have wanted it, the competition was going to be held on a beach, right next to the water, with loud music blasting and big weights flying. It was a chance for weightlifters to pay their respects to the memory of a good friend, and I made the decision that I was going to fly down and compete as soon as I heard about it. I had been out of competitive lifting for almost three years at the time. I had no plans to put together any kind of impressive total, and it didn’t matter at all. What mattered was the having the chance to honor a fallen friend in the most appropriate way I could imagine, by lifting big weights on a platform with his name painted on it.

The 2003 Greg Johnson Memorial

When I arrived in Sacramento the day before the meet, it’s fair to say that I was not exactly in the greatest phase of my lifting career. I had maintained some decent strength through the powerlifting movements I had been doing in the gym, but I wasn’t ready to snatch or clean and jerk anything impressive. It had been almost a year since I had done a snatch in training. I had no idea what I could expect. And on top of all this, I had just gone through a very painful divorce. It wasn’t the rock-bottom time period of my life, but it was a long way from the salad days.

Brett Kelly, Greg’s close friend and Team Sac teammate, offered me a room in his house for the weekend. The day before the meet, all the volunteers got together to haul the weights, platform lumber, and meet supplies to the beach and set up for the next day. I wanted to be in on all of it, regardless of how tired it made me for the meet the next day. We all worked until sundown to prepare the competition area, and then we went out to eat burgers, drink beers, and tell Greg stories. When the meet began the next day, there was something in the air. In twenty years of weightlifting, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a competition where there was as much happiness, enthusiasm, mutual support, and weightlifting camaraderie as there was at this meet. To put it simply, everything was perfect. The sun was shining, people were smiling and lifting with everything they had, the music was blasting, and lots of fans had showed up to watch the action. In other words, it was exactly the way Greg would have wanted it.

And the crazy part of the whole experience is that I had an incredible day of lifting. I went three-for-three in the snatch, nailing an easy 142.5 on my last attempt. In the clean and jerk, I made 155, 165, and cleaned 170 for a narrow miss in the jerk. These weights were still well below my personal bests, but they were much better than I had expected. However, more important than the weights I lifted was the way I felt on the platform. I felt the energy of this meet in my bone marrow. I felt the spiritual presence of a lost friend who gave everything he had to make people better weightlifters, and all the smiles and laughs we had shared as we sat on barstools and toasted the prime years of our youth. I felt the disappointment and pain from the last three years of my life melting off me like frost every time I chalked my hands and stepped on the platform. I howled at the sky like an animal after successful lifts. People were screaming, "Do it for Greg!!" as I reached down to grip the bar and I knew, for some reason, that all of my pathetic little problems were no bigger than the molecules of dust that rose from the platform when the bumper plates came crashing down. This moment... this perfect moment was a healing experience for me. The loss of my weightlifting dream and the loss of my marriage evaporated into the air of that beach as I held that barbell over my head. After my last lift, with the applause and appreciation of the weightlifting family still ringing out, I took off my weightlifting shoes, ran off the platform, and dove into the cool water. The waves rippled as I rose to the surface and floated on my back for a few minutes, looking at the blue sky and listening to the meet announcer laughing into the microphone and thanking the crowd for coming out to watch the meet. I can tell you right now, seven years later, that it was one of the happiest moments of my life.

I got out of the water, dried off, and Brett started handing out the awards to the athletes. The biggest award of the day was an enormous trophy that had "The Greg Johnson Memorial Award" engraved on the plate. Team Sacramento had designed the award to be given to the athlete who, as they phrased it, demonstrated spirit and intensity on the platform that would honor Greg Johnson’s memory. They gave me this trophy, and it stands on a cabinet in the den of my house. I’m looking at it as I type these very words.

The aftermath...

When I came home from this competition, I had the fire back in my guts. I was encouraged by the lifts I had been able to make at the meet and it occurred to me that I wanted to give my weightlifting career another shot. Four months later, I won the silver medal at the American Open. Four months after that, I placed fourth at the Senior National Championships and qualified to compete in the 2004 US Olympic Trials at the age of 32.

In a twist of poetic justice, I traveled back to good old St. Joseph, Missouri for the Trials. My knee was hurting, training hadn’t gone perfect, I had no realistic shot of actually making the Olympic Team, and I didn’t give a damn about any of these things. With the help of a departed friend, I had dug myself out of a black pit of self-doubt, and I stood on the Olympic Trials competition platform with my final clean and jerk completed over my head. Somebody in St. Joseph must have known something about my comeback situation because after my lifting session was over and the fans had all left the auditorium, the name "Foreman" stayed illuminated on the scoreboard. I found a chair, sat down next to the platform, and stared at that scoreboard until the custodial crew told me that they were shutting off the lights and locking the building up. Then I went back to the meet hotel, cleaned up, and went to meet some old friends for beers.

I’ve spent a lot of time since the 2004 Trials thinking about how this whole story unfolded. Greg Johnson’s death was a tragedy that nothing can cure. It made my knee injury and personal problems look like a game of tiddlywinks. Many of you who are reading this article have felt your share of dark moments just like these. Certainly, some of you have even walked through hellfire that was much hotter than anything I’ve spoken of. You might even be feeling the flames of those fires right now. And I don’t have any magic words for you that are going to fix anything. Nobody does. All I can offer is the idea that there is a healing out there somewhere, and it probably lies in the thing you love most. After all the years of frustration, my healing came from doing the most obvious thing I could think of... going back to weightlifting. Weightlifting was what I loved most, and my salvation had been right in front of my face the whole time. Maybe we’re all part of a bigger plan, and that plan is going to drag us over some rough territory at times. Maybe there is no plan, and everything that happens to us in life is just random activity. Either way, there are a few things I know for sure. Life is a beautiful thing, the world is a fine place, and the best thing we can all do is try to find love and happiness while we’ve still got the chance. The title of this article is a line from a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He wrote it after his best friend died in 1833. The last line I’ll give you is from Bob Marley: "Everything’s gonna be alright."