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Madeline Albright
04/28/06
by Clay

According to the New York Times Magazine interview from this Sunday, Madeleine Albright "can leg-press up to 400 pounds." This might be the single most remarkable stat I have ever heard about a former member of the Clinton cabinet. And that's truly saying something. After all my discomfort over how little athletic ability and strength I have compared to seven rounds worth of NFL draft picks, now I have to worry about a former Secretary of State who is approaching seventy. Has it really gotten to the point where if I followed Madeleine Albright on a leg machine, I would have to lower the weight? Even worse if I crowded her on the leg press would Albright glance up at me with five plates on either leg and slowly extend her middle finger in my direction as she did a nice slow rep? Then, when she was finished, would she smirk and lower the weight? What has become of my life?

Albright angrily denies that Clay is anywhere near as strong as she is.

It's not that I thought I had particularly strong legs. After all since I graduated from law school my workout regimen has slowly come to focus on what my buddy Tardio calls "straight bouncer muscles." These would be the triceps, biceps, chest, shoulders, and back. Between the two of us we haven't done a leg exercise in several years because in Tardio's words, "After you turn twenty-five nobody cares about your legs." For the record despite our prodigious bouncer strength we have also never thrown anyone out of a bar by the ears either. So it's not as if I'm one of those guys whose self-worth is encapsulated in their bench press. But, seriously, Madeleine Albright can leg press 400 pounds?

It's not like I begrudge other people their strength. For instance I've grown accustomed to marveling over how many times some guys at the NFL Combine can do 225 pounds on the bench press. For most of college my goal was to be able to bench press 225 pounds just one time. When I finally managed to do 225 once, I stopped trying to increase my bench for almost five years because for that one moment in time I had been capable of loading up the bar with two forty-five pound plates on each side. This represented success for me. But now I'm gripped with a whole new level of self-doubt, Madeleine Albright can leg press 400 pounds? If she kicked me in the head would my head just explode into mush like one of those characters from Kill Bill?

Exploding heads were too hard to find so I decided to with exploding breasts instead.

In an effort to glean more knowledge about the leg press, I called my friend Neville and discussed Albright's outlandish leg strength with him. He was incredulous. "I would guarantee that less than 1% of seventy-year old women in the world even know what the leg press machine is," he said. Clearly Neville is an expert on senior citizen women. He continued, "But Dan Kendra of Florida State once set a record by leg pressing thirteen-hundred and thirty-five pounds. The capillaries in his eyes exploded."

Pictured: Capillaries. Not pictured: Exploding capillaries.

This was not a pleasant image. But at least on the never before considered, Am I more like Dan Kendra or Madeleine Albright scale, I would be more like Dan Kendra since I am male and the same age, as opposed to, say, female and almost seventy. Also, neither Dan Kendra nor I ever have negotiated a peace treaty or been Secretary of State. If Dan Kendra could do over thirteen-hundred, I could do four-hundred, right?

Dan Kendra erupts in cheers upon finding out that Clay is more like him than Madeleine Albright.

On Tuesday of this week, Albright's leg strength brought me back into contact with a leg machine at the gym for the first time in years. I had to find out how much I could leg press. I'm twenty-seven now and, after all, my dad once told me that athletes reach their physical peak at the age of about twenty-seven. I enlisted Tardio to help me, a. find the leg-press machine and b. load up the machine with the requisite weight. So it was that in the midst of our bouncer workout, we took a detour by the leg press machine.

The first obstacle to overcome was figuring out what in the world weight I should begin with. The second was figuring out how to correctly operate the leg press machine. For the uninitiated using the leg press machine requires you to basically lie on your back with your feet above you in the air. It's a position roughly akin to the one that astronauts adopted when they reentered earth in those tiny space capsules during the 1960's. Then you place you feet on a large surface and, not surprisingly based on the name of the machine, press upwards with your legs.

We loaded up the machine to 270 pounds and I did a comfortable set of seven or eight. I have to admit I was feeling pretty confident. So confident, in fact, that we decided to eschew all of the weights between 270 and say…410. This was based upon Tardio's suggestion that we should "go ahead and show Albright up." So I climbed on the machine and took on 410.

It was not a pretty picture. My legs wobbled and I gritted my teeth. I poured every ounce of energy I had into a single rep and reracked the machine. "Take that Albright," I said from my prone position on the ground. Tardio shook his head. "That wasn't a rep," he said. "You didn't go down far enough." A debate ensued about exactly how far one had to go to actually complete a leg press rep. In its absolute lack of knowledge this debate was the rough equivalent of your average Florida native discussing the finer points of Iditarod sled-dog racing techniques.

Ultimately I acceded to Tardio's convincing definition of a leg press rep requiring both legs to be "parallel." Whatever that meant. Especially because I had previously been operating under the extremely misguided notion that my two legs were almost always parallel to one another. With my confidence a bit lessened, I once again took the weight upon my legs and eased my way down for a legitimate rep. When Tardio said that my legs had advanced far enough, I gathered my strength and captured images of my nearly seventy-year old former Secretary of State nemesis who doesn't even know I exist for inspiration. And then I exploded upward. But instead of moving higher, the weight actually came further down until my legs were in danger of resembling large ears.

Parallel legs.

"Lock it out," Tardio said, by which he meant pull the lever on the machine to stop the inexorable advance of the 410 pounds. Unfortunately the lever on the leg press machine does not work until you have pressed your weight to a suitably high level. This seems like a relatively glaring leg press design flaw, but I digress. Tardio sprung into action by pouring his shoulder alongside my feet and attempting to drive the leg press machine higher. Nothing.

"Pull off some weights," I grunted as my tendons, ligaments, and bones continued to stretch to unholy angles. With my legs bowed akimbo, I now resembled a large, non-amphibious frog. Tardio rapidly removed a twenty-five plate from each side and once more threw his shoulder into the mighty leg press machine. Still nothing. Later Tardio would tell me that at this point my face was redder than he had ever seen it. Somehow, I found myself wondering what would happen if my eye capillaries burst. Tardio once more pulled weights off, this time two forty-five pound weights from each side. Again, nothing.

Once more Tardio pulled forty-five pound plates off. The area around the leg press machine was now surrounded by a collection of weights strewn about as if a tornado had just passed. Worst of all, not one person in the entire Vanderbilt Recreation Center seemed concerned with our plight. Later Tardio would say, "It was almost like they were rooting for you to be crushed." Tardio once more threw his shoulder into the machine, and slowly, the mighty leg press machine began to rise. My legs were like jello but we managed to lock the leg press in place. I climbed off the machine. My gym street cred had just taken a debilitating blow. Quickly I scanned the gym finding derision in all its manifold signs. I found it everywhere, in the pony-tailed girl who would not even meet my gaze. In the slight grimace of disgust from the guy who always wore Under Armour even though he never seemed to be working out. And even from the gym employee who was usually sleeping at his desk but this time just chortled when I walked past. Tardio shook his head forlornly and looked at me.

"Maybe they don't know," he said, "that Madeleine Albright is stronger than you."

Albright shakes hands with soldiers before taking time out to leg press the entire platoon.

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