My First Love Affair.

What is it about strength training?
Why did I fall in love with it? What is it about knowing there's a bar on my back that could crush me if I let it? Knowing that if I slip, or miscalculate, or overestimate, or rush things, I could end up in traction, or dead? Is it sane to push yourself to the limit, to see the face of your borders and smile (after washing the puke off your face)?
There's a meditative quality to it. It demands attention. Strict attention. Not that sort of attention that comes when you're really into a novel and you realize you just read 20 pages without thinking. Its much more primal, instinctive than that. Having a cast iron mass poised above your head, drilling you into the ground forces all those little quibbles and quirks of your conscious mind to shut up and get out. There's no room for thought.
I read some where (can't remember where) that you know you're on your way to being a great dead lifter if it takes 7 seconds for your soul to reenter your body after a heavy lift. That stuck with me. I think of that quite often.
Aleister Crowley describes enlightenment as a state where the observer and the observed are no longer differentiated. They mingle in a great explosive realization that the universe is One. Maybe that's why I love it when I'm lifting and time seems to stand still and there's nothing left in my world but this black mass of trance. I put down the weight and can't tell where I was, there was nothing but pure movement, pure trained response, unmitigated strain. Its meditative.