When Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

There are a few really astounding gym incidents that I’ve been able only to hear about, rather than witness firsthand. For example, there are variations on the collarless barbell: A guy doing bench presses with three plates on each side pushes up unevenly; the bar tips to one side, all three plates spill off the barbell, the bar seesaws wildly through the air, and the three plates on the other side go crashing to the ground. You’ll also come across the barbell catapult when someone unloads a barbell by first stripping all the plates from just one side.

(The most exciting thing to happen between me and a barbell occurred during a set of upright rows. A woman, distracted by a conversation with her boyfriend, speared herself by walking into the end of my barbell.)

I read somewhere that the reason truth is even stranger than fiction is because fiction is governed by probabilities. Several years ago, I came across this incident on a bodybuilding site that I couldn’t have even imagined:

There was this other guy who was benching about 200 pounds. The benches were arranged along a big window that leads out to the carpark … When you lay down, the window is behind your head. So, the guy finishes his final rep, but misses the “hooks” or whatever you call them on his bench. The bar flew crashing through the window and rolled down the carpark

I believe it was Albert Einstein who said that the difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.