Part 1

The hotel room always looks the same. Whether it’s Columbus, Ohio, or Tampa, Florida, or somewhere in Washington state, the walls are always beige, the carpet is always industrial, and the air always smells the same. It smells like Pro Tan, cold sweat, and anxiety.

I’m standing in front of the mirror, but I’m not looking at myself. I’m looking at a project. A machine. At forty years old, the machine is starting to make noises it shouldn’t make. The warranty is expired. But here I am, eleven weeks deep into a deficit, starving the human parts of me so the aesthetic parts can survive.

People see the stage photos. They see the oil and the lights. They don’t see the mathematics of survival that happen in these hotel rooms. They don’t see the salt.

“I just need more food,” I tell the empty room. “Real food.”

I’ve been eating rice cakes. Dry, Styrofoam discs. Four bananas. That’s the fuel. But tonight, the protocol flips. The body is a manipulator. Tonight, I have to flood the system. Burgers. Fries. Ketchup. An obscene amount of salt. We do this to pull water into the muscle, to make the skin tight, to look “full.” It’s the great irony of this sport: to look the healthiest you’ve ever looked, you have to do the unhealthiest things imaginable to your internal organs. You treat your stomach like a chemistry set.

My sponsor, Chris, comes in. He’s not looking at my face; he’s looking at my delts. He’s looking at the asset.

“Best conditioning ever,” he says. “Best size ever.”

He’s doing his job. He needs to believe his investment is sound. I need to believe it too, because if I don’t, the math stops working. And the math is brutal.

Let’s be honest about the economics of the “Pro” life. The NBA guys, the NFL guys—they live in a different stratosphere. In the IFBB, unless you are in the top five in the world, you aren’t making a living off your body. You’re making a living off the idea of your body.

I coach forty-eight clients back home. Forty-eight people who pay me to tell them how to eat and lift, banking on the credibility I earn by standing on this stage. If I place well, I get more clients. If I drop out of the top ten, the phone stops ringing. I’m not just competing for a plastic trophy; I’m competing for my business model. It costs more to fly here and book this hotel than the prize money pays out.

I’m paying for the privilege of suffering.

“If I don’t get top ten,” I say, and the words feel heavy in the recycled air, “I’m probably going to retire. There’s just no point in continuing.”

That’s the gun to the head. It’s not about ego anymore—well, it is, but it’s an ego tied to survival. You start second-guessing your worth. Am I really cut out for this? You look at the twenty-year-olds coming up, fresh cartilage, no injuries, metabolic rates like blast furnaces. And here I am, forty, counting grains of salt on a rice cake.

The mental toll is heavier than the weights. For three months, I haven’t been a person. I haven’t gone out for drinks. I haven’t stayed up late. I’ve been a monk in a church of iron. “I can’t let that get in the way,” I tell myself. But what I’m really saying is, I can’t let life get in the way of the show.

My girlfriend is here. She’s supportive, but she’s watching a man slowly dismantle himself. And tomorrow, her parents are coming. They’ve never seen a show. They’re normal Americans. They like sports, sure—football, baseball. They understand touchdowns and home runs.

They don’t understand this.

They don’t understand why a grown man would shave his entire body, paint himself the color of mahogany furniture, put on a slip of fabric the size of a postage stamp, and grimace at a room full of strangers.

“I think they’ll get along great,” I say, trying to convince myself. “My dad loves sports. They’re sports junkies.”

But this isn’t sports to most people. This is a freak show with better lighting. And tomorrow, I have to introduce myself to my potential in-laws while I’m dehydrated, starving, and naked.

The pressure isn’t the heavy squat. The pressure is the silence in the hotel room when you realize you’ve bet your entire identity on a judge’s subjective opinion of your glutes. You wonder if you’re just an aging narcissist or a disciplined athlete. The line blurs when you’re hungry.

I eat the burger. I feel the salt hit my system like a drug. I lie down, terrified that I’ll wake up five pounds lighter, that the body will eat the muscle overnight. Sleep is just an intermission between anxiety attacks.

This is the glamour. This is the dream.

Part 2

Backstage is a surrealist painting. It’s a hallway of bodies, a sea of synthetic skin tones. We are all waiting like cattle, but cattle with egos.

I’m pumping up. You have a window of maybe five minutes where the muscle looks perfect. Do too much, you burn out the glycogen and look flat. Do too little, you look soft. It’s a tightrope walk. Johnny, my posing coach, is tweaking my stance. “Arch the foot,” he says. “Twist harder.”

My body is cramping. It wants water. I’m giving it tension.

Then, the collision happens. The real world walks into the fantasy.

My girlfriend’s parents arrive.

I’m standing there, glistening with oil, wearing nothing but the number 19 pinned to my hip. And I have to shake her father’s hand.

“Nice to meet you,” I say.

“Wow,” he says. “I can’t believe I’m actually seeing you in person.”

He’s polite. He’s American polite. But I can see the confusion in his eyes. He’s looking at a man who is smaller than the monsters on TV—I was the second or third smallest in the group—but still otherworldly compared to the guys at his local hardware store. I make a joke to break the tension.

“You’re a lot better looking than Hulk Hogan,” he says.

We laugh. It’s a relief. But underneath the laughter, there is the stark reality of what I’ve become to do this. I have removed myself from society to stand on this pedestal. I am a specimen to be examined, not a person to be known.

We go out for the comparisons. The judges line us up. They move us around like furniture. Move 19 next to 24. They are comparing my lats to another man’s lats. They are judging my work ethic against his genetics.

I didn’t make the first call-out. That means top seven is gone.

The panic flares, hot and sharp. If I don’t make top ten, I don’t get to do my routine. If I don’t do my routine, I don’t get that three minutes of solo time on stage. If I don’t get that time, why did I spend eleven weeks eating rice cakes? Why did I skip the dinners, the parties, the life?

I made the second call-out. Top twelve. I’m on the bubble.

This is where the political game of bodybuilding crushes you. It’s subjective. It’s not a ball going through a hoop. It’s a panel of people deciding if your aesthetic pleases them today. You can be the hardest worker in the room and lose to a guy with better insertions.

I walk off stage, waiting for the night show. The hours drag. The tan starts to streak. The hunger turns into a dull ache. I’m forty years old, waiting for permission to show the world what I built.

Part 3 The night show is different. The crowd is louder. The lights are hotter.

They call the names for the routines. They call my name.

I made the cut. Top ten.

I walk out. The music hits. For three minutes, the politics don’t matter. The money doesn’t matter. The forty-eight clients don’t matter. It’s just me and the movement. I hit the poses I’ve practiced in front of a bathroom mirror a thousand times. I feel the crowd. I feel the validation rushing in, filling the holes that the hunger carved out.

I didn’t win. I wasn’t even close to winning. I didn’t beat the young phenoms. I didn’t get a giant check that changes my life.

I walk off stage, and the adrenaline dumps. I’m exhausted.

“100% satisfied,” I say to the camera, forcing a smile. “I came here to get top ten. I beat out some Olympian competitors. Bigger and leaner than I’ve ever been at forty.”

And it’s true. I achieved the goal. I proved I’m not obsolete.

But as I wipe the oil off in the locker room, the silence comes back. The high of the stage evaporates instantly. I’m just a guy in a gym bag again. I have to go find a restaurant. I have to eat something that isn’t measured in grams.

And then, I have to go home. I have to go back to the forty-eight clients. I have to earn the money back that I just spent.

I didn’t win a championship. I just bought myself a little more time. I bought the right to say, “I’m still a bodybuilder.” I bought the right to not be just a forty-year-old man.

The system didn’t change. The industry didn’t care. But for tonight, the machine held together.

“We’ll see about next year,” I say. But we all know the truth. I’ll be back in the hotel room, eating the rice cakes, chasing the lights until the lights finally go out for good.