During my final year of little league baseball, the coach, understanding how hopeless I was, gave me a “special position” beyond left field, way back out by the fence (actually, it was the fence). Oblivious, thinking I’d been given carte blanche, I’d lean up against a post and stare at the clouds, completely caught by surprise when the bat cracked a long drive, the ball flew toward me, and parents started screaming from the bleachers. I even brought a book out there with me once, taking it out of my back pocket and reading as the game went on.

Maybe it’s just the competition angle of exercise that’s always pushed me away, being that I was raised by someone who valued rivalry above all else. My father bench pressed 450 pounds three times a week. If there was sun in the Colorado sky, he was outside in electric blue spandex shorts and matching flip-flops, sucking up rays until his skin turned the color of French toast.

He was the kind of guy who looked at the world like I imagined early man gazed upon the advent of fire. Reality was perilous, and the only way he could fight back was to turn his body into a suit of armor. I’d seen him pull a man through a car window at a stoplight after the man cut him off in traffic. I’d seen him slam the heads of those who wronged him into walls and run after doorbell-ditchers like a blood-crazed animal.

I, on the other hand, drew pictures of dragons, wizards, and popular anime characters. As a young boy I liked Rainbow Bright, My Little Pony, Care Bears, and Thundercats. I read fantasy novels and collected comic books that depicted men and women who were preternaturally strong not because they worked out, but because they’d been exposed to gamma radiation or came from an alien world. I was pigeon toed. I had (and still have) a disproportionately long torso for the size of my legs. I have terrible depth perception and a low pain threshold.

None of that really made sense to the man who raised me. He shamed me into weekend trips to the gym, poking at my chubby, 13-year-old stomach and reciting gems of wisdom like, “If you don’t start working out now you’ll have diabetes when you’re 16.”

The smells that swirl around your average suburban health club are equally rancid and anodyne. Men and women (but mostly men) dominate the weight room, crawling under the skeletons of medieval-looking machines. An eau du inadequacy permeates every inch of sweaty air. Though there are certainly exceptions, the majority of gyms in this country aren’t places where you go to feel good about yourself. They’re places where you go to be shamed into self-improvement. There’s someone always fitter than you working on his deltoids, who grunts louder than you, and whose veins bulge out farther.

And there I’d be on a Saturday morning, standing flabby-armed beside my muscle-bound father, feeling a combination of bored, angry, and scared as he adjusted the weights. Though I didn’t start going to the gym with him until I was a teenager, with a role model like mine how could I help not internalizing ineptitude early on? When you live in the same house as Goliath, you either become David, or you become utterly crushed.