Over the past two decades—originally fueled by the Crossfit phenomenon—weight training has become more popular among more people than ever before. That’s led to a great many physical transformations, as with Adrian Nathan West; it’s also led more than a few people to the door marked illicit gains. But as West details with humor and candor, we might be making too much of the “illicit” part. You don’t have to agree to enjoy the piece.
As a youth, I thought exercise was for morons and looked at my body as I did at a car: a thing to rely upon, its needs ignored until it gave out in a future too distant to bother contemplating. But then, over the course of a single school year, I had bacterial pericarditis and viral pleurisy bookended by two bouts of bronchitis, and I got scared that if I kept smoking and taking drugs, I might die. I started weightlifting because Henry Rollins did it and because, at five-eleven and 125 pounds, I had no aptitude for any actual sport. I took as gospel the prevailing prejudices about steroids, listed here in order of veracity: they give you acne, shrink your balls, make your hair fall out, give you heart disease, make you aggressive, shrivel your penis. What changed my thinking ten years or so later was, ironically, reading an article about the death of Andreas Münzer, an Austrian bodybuilder, from multiple organ failure in 1996. Der Spiegel published Münzer’s drug cycle in the weeks leading up to his last contest, when he was on a smorgasbord of injectable steroids, as well as insulin, growth hormone, ephedrine, IGF-1, and dozens of tablets a day of Halotestin, Dianabol, and Winstrol. Due to their hepatoxicity, orals are often considered more dangerous than injectables, and the Munich doctor who performed Münzer’s autopsy described half his liver as crumbly “like Styrofoam,” and the other half as “full of masses the size of ping-pong balls.”
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