Colorado Springs – US
Association of Blind Athletes Power-lifting Qualification
When
you witness the power the blind exert, you realize two things: normality is a
fallacy and if you have the gift of sight—or any gift—use it. Use it for the
benefit of humankind. Use every ounce of it.
דּ
The
kids were friendly, still searching in the darkness for a familiar face, a
place to not be a stranger anymore. "You have curly hair," a plump,
girl in black spandex and a shirt said. It might have been stating the obvious
to you, but it wasn't obvious to half the people in the room. She had glaucoma;
others were completely blind.
"That's
right," I replied with a smile. The friendliness of the room warmed my
heart. They weren't competing at all. Not with anyone present, except perhaps
the forty-five pound barbell or the five to four hundred pound weight plates
upon it, which they power-lifted. They were ritually gathered together around
the bar and the phantoms of darkness that swarmed like a tornado around it.
Gravity, the unstoppable force: They were gathered to temporarily defy it.
Lisa,
who sat beside her, all eighty-or-less pounds of her, was among the completely
blind. So what. After she was led to the barbell, she proved someone wrong. Her
face showed the intention. A ghost stood before her within arm's reach. It
didn't understand or care to understand; it was suffering incarnate, a tornado
of delusion, anger, greed, and frustration. Disability, for it, extended into
the nether reaches beyond sight. Its phantom tendrils infected the soul. Perhaps
it spread into intelligence, strength, cognition, or singing ability.
Lisa
bent down, for the third time this thunderous afternoon, to take the bar. She
planted her stick-like legs, wrapped her hands around the coarse barbell, left
over and right under. With a force and fury she was up, her knees and back
straightening, the bar was surprised at its levitation from the comfortable
padding. She growled and grunted all at once. The phantom, the phantom,
banished a bit at a time, with each unexpected triumph. At the coach's call,
she set the bar down again, her deadlift done, her phantom banished. A circuit
of handclaps secured the silence of the bigotgeist.
She
slightly swept the air in her timid return to her seat. Each seat in the small
weight gym of the Colorado School for the Deaf-Blind represented a separate
section of the US, each attempting to qualify for US Special Olympics.
"If
I lift this," Darryl joked before shouldering three hundred some pounds,
"I'll get my sight back." He shakily stepped back from the red rack
and planted. He squatted and struggled. The weight of a lifetime of special
treatment buckled him. But his head and eyes faced heaven and he rose.
The
coach, Rob, helped everyone up. He pointed out the specific form, technique,
and psychology to lifting the bar away from its lethargic cradle and proudly
standing. Even if he sometimes didn't tell the lifter how many plates the
volunteers had slid on the barbell. Under his expert coaching, Marlin, a
compact, chiseled olive-skinned powerhouse lifted nearly three times his own
body weight in the squat and deadlift. Under his expert coaching, Ben, a
younger and wider version of Brad Pitt, broke the US Special Olympics
Power-lifting record for his weight and age category.
Thunder
ripped thousands of cubic feet of oxygen with gigawatts of power somewhere
above the summer of Colorado Springs. "It's an omen," Ben's high
school coach said as Ben bent over the four hundred pound barbell. Each pound
was a pound he'd received, an evil glance or an averted eye or a whispered
gossip far away, born of misconception, or another of the four causes of
suffering. Ben's deadlift was a vajra. His suddenly erect back was a lightning
and thunderbolt of it's own, dispelling the illusion. Gigawatts of emotion ripped
the geist of bigotry asunder. Each spectator and co-competitor cupped a pocket
of thunder in his or her hands again and again: clap, clap, clapˇ¦.
דּ
Little
raindrops fell, though my uncle's windshield wipers would clear them away. It
was a proud time. Anyone who witnessed would have been struck by the lightning.
It was contagious.
It
seared my heart especially, because one of them was in the ˇ°50 and overˇ± age
group. And she is mom.