Death of a Bodybuilder

A bodybuilder friend of mine died recently. I’m not using his name here to protect his name against things he told me. I’m not sure what of his past was public knowledge and what wasn’t. Many of his stories I heard before or after 12 step meetings—we tend to tell each other, even out of the direct context of the meeting itself, very personal information.

I don’t know what took him down. I probably won’t find out. But if you know anything about the bodybuilding world, you know that they die on their own schedule. And in the last few years, the rate seems to have accelerated. Some will say it’s always been this deadly, we just know about it now, whereas before the proliferation of social media, people’s death rumors didn’t circulate so quickly. And in the vast majority of these bodybuilder deaths, the families never disclose the reports.

I wish I had seen him get to higher levels in the sport. He never got his “pro card” which would signify that he’s a professional bodybuilder. I never got to see him live, onstage in all his glory.

Bodybuilding is the odd sport in which you’re most likely to injure yourself preparing for it than during the competitions. Any other sport, you’re holding back, being more careful, then on game day letting it all go. The roughest of combat and contact sports rely on the athletes’ ability to recover between the contests that brutalize their bodies. But in bodybuilding, there’s no rest until retirement.

There are two main phases in bodybuilding before the contest: the bulk and the cut. The bulk consists of eating the human limits of food intake and processing—there’s only so much protein the body can consume and process in a day—paired with workouts designed to strategically break down the muscle tissue so that it grows back bigger. The cut is a calorie reduction designed to burn off the fat gained in the bulk to get that shredded look necessary to win. And through all the phases, not just steroids, but many drugs are required to get to that stage-ready state: SARMs, peptides, and tren are common to recover and grow, supplements galore for pre, during, and post-workouts, and even diuretics are used in the days before a competition to suck all the water possible, to the brink of kidney failure, from the competitor’s skin. And there are other drugs that are taken by some—Mike Mentzer was a heavy amphetamine user in the 70s—to get themselves amped up, keep energy going during cuts, and to calm the nervous system down enough to sleep.

The entire sport is literally about the limits of your own body. Nothing about the workouts or diets is normal. And while they carve themselves into superhero-like statues, many of them are suffering through the moments of competition, cramping and light-headed from dangerous dehydration. Most people can’t get either the bulk high enough or the body fat levels low enough without drastic chemical and lifestyle measures, and are only stage-ready for very short windows of time.

Every year, there are one or two outliers who are able to come back year after year in top form, but for the majority of competitors, the top-level preparation is just too much for their body to handle. There are tendon, ligament, and muscle injuries that either change the shape of the muscle or preclude training. There are numerous organ failures that will end a career. And then there are diseases from weird cocktails of drugs and self-administered needle shots. The sheer amounts of macronutrients in regular food overload the body’s ability to digest it.

In short, when I heard my friend died, I was sad but I wasn’t surprised—he was a competitor in a deadly sport.

There’s that saying—“he died doing what he loved.” It’s a darkly funny saying among drug addicts. We love doing drugs, and it kills us. “He died doing what he loved—smoking meth on a Tuesday morning.” That kind of joke goes over very well in the parking lots of churches when the meetings get out. We have a very morbid sense of humor.

Usually, the saying is reserved for more classically understood professions and lifestyles—first responders, soldiers, and full-contact athletes. Then there’s another tier of humanity, of combat sports, race car drivers, and stuntmen who are thought to be taking a big risk but the reward is socially worth it. But as you go down the ladder, people stop having sympathy and rather talk in superior tones of less desirable lives: sex workers, the unhoused—they seem to have been “asking for it” with their life choices. I’m not going to say where bodybuilders are on this chart, but I guarantee you, most people think they’re idiots for trying.

What I saw in my friend was a dedication to his goals that superseded all else. As a creative being, I get it. I know plenty of novelists and standup comics who ruined their personal lives and their health chasing after a dream. I’ve seen writers push themselves to the edge trying to find a genius beyond their own capacity. I’ve known comics who got further out into space hoping to achieve Richard Pryor-type levels. And how many young poets like me who loved Charles Bukowski’s work mistakenly thought our creativity was aligned with alcohol? We try to beat time with amphetamines in the pursuit of finishing a novel, like Kerouac, in 72 straight hours.

And aside from the chemical push, at some point, I’ve had to choose between relationships and art—the amount of time and energy I put into learning a craft kept me from putting the same work into a romantic partnership. And so many comics lack close, personal people as they live a life on the road, never getting emotionally intimate with anyone. And still, I will see these obsessive pushes toward creative genius as romantic. Sometimes I wonder, if I didn’t have any other people in my life, how many novels I could write a year, but then again, what would the content be? I would probably just write 1000-page tomes about loneliness that they would find around my place after I was dead.

The frightening aspect of his drive was that it was fueled by dysmorphia. He thought he was small, no matter how big he became. This is when I wish I could show you a picture. One time when I hugged him, I told him he felt like a refrigerator wearing a hoodie. So weird to feel a human that size who was that solid.