300 = Number of ass-kicking Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae.

4:20 = The chosen time of day for many people to impair their cognitive abilities through the inhalation of tetrahydrocannabinol.

69 = The summer that contained the best days of Bryan Adam’s life. (You were thing of something else, weren’t you? Pervo.)

315 = One 45 pound barbell with six 45 pound plates on it, also known as a bench press milestone that many men aspire to.

For power lifters benching 315 pounds is a warm up set, but for us normal guys it feels like a shit-ton of weight. It is quite possible that the desire to bench 315 qualifies as one of those “stupid guy things,” and if so then that’s one sin I’ll admit to being guilty of. Like most silly things that guys do, it started with a bet.

I should note that I didn’t just jump right in and go for it. About a half dozen years ago my workout partner and I were trash-talking each other at the gym because I was benching more than he was. Eventually, the conversation turned to that magic number of being able to bench press 315 pounds. I told him if I took a month to prepare I could do it.

“Bullshit.”

“Bet ya.”

And so it was on.

And I lost.

Oh, I trained hard and got so that I could do a one rep bench of 300 pounds pretty consistently, but on the last day of October – the day we had agreed upon – I tried 315 for the first time and couldn’t do it. I blame my friend who was spotting me, because he’d gotten tanked up the night before at a Halloween party and had the reek of gin coming out of his pores which blew my concentration.

Who am I kidding? It wasn’t his fault. I was weak. Any puny. And unworthy. And $20 poorer.

A couple of years later I had changed jobs to being Director of Marketing for the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary. Coincidentally, it was because of this job that I got to meet many members of my advisory committee and led to the writing of my book.

I had a friendly rivalry going on with one of the trainers at the gym, and the whole idea of benching 315 came up again. He’d never done it either, and we were both very similar in strength, so we made a non-monetary wager to have a competition two months hence and see if we could do it.

I spent the next month adapting my program to a strength building focus, lowering my reps and increasing the weight, but four weeks before we were slated to compete I’d noticed that I hadn’t seen my rival around the gym for while.

“Where’s Jesse?” I asked the head trainer.

“He quit. Got his dream job as a fire fighter. Been gone for a week now.”

Well, crud.

Here I’d been training my ass off for this lift, I was getting close to 40 years old, and I was psyched to actually do it this time because it felt like my last chance, but my whole competitive impetus to do so had evaporated. I started to bemoan this fact to the head trainer and another one of the regular lifters at the gym overhead me.

I never did learn his name, but he was one of those huge football player type guys, and he butted into our conversation. “What do you need Jesse around for? Just do the damn lift.”

“I’m not ready yet. We weren’t supposed to do it for another month, but I don’t really feel like it anymore.”

“How much can you lift now?” he asked.

I told him that I could barely manage 300.

“Hell, if you can do 300 you can do 315. Come on, I’ll spot you.”

His tone brooked no argument. I’m not the type of person to follow people blindly, but for some reason I found myself following the lead of this guy I hardly knew.

I went to put my first 45 pound plate on the barbell and he said, “No. Not that way. It’s backwards.”

“What?”

“Plates always face in.”

Being that it was a university gym we had old school equipment; our plates were not of the new-fangled variety that have handles cut into them. These ones had a flat side and an embossed side with the words “Olympco” and “45 lbs” on them. According to power lifter guy, the embossed side was supposed to go in because of the way that you grab the plate allows you to grip it with your fingers to get a better hold.

I guess that made sense.

“Not only that,” he asserted, “but it’s a mental thing. Plates facing in means the energy they contain faces inwards, so it can’t escape. You can use that energy to make the lift.”

Okay then.

He could tell I was skeptical. “Listen, this is mostly a mental thing. You’ve got to believe you can do it. Any doubt and you’re gonna drop that weight on your fucking neck, so don’t have any doubts, okay?”

This was not helping.

I did a warm up set of 135 eight times and took a rest, feeling nervous. “Okay,” power lifter guy advised as we loaded another 90 pounds on, “it’s time to really start psyching yourself up. You need to start thinking about your chest muscles like they’re on fire. Imagine that they are turning red. Think that you’ve got a mini Arnold Schwarzenegger in each pec.

So I tried that, and then benched 225 five times. I wasn’t feeling psyched up yet. I didn’t think I was going to be able to do it. We loaded another 90 pounds on and then I sat on the bench to rest, feeling worrisome.

“Look at me,” he said. “Have you ever seen the movie Apollo 13?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

“Good, because there is a scene in that movie that you need to think about. When everything is going to shit, and everyone thinks the astronauts are going to die, Ed Harris says something really important. Do you remember what he said?”

I did. “Failure is not an option.”

“Damn straight. It’s not that you can do it. You WILL do it. You MUST! Got it?”

I’m not going to go into excessive detail about the lift, because we’re talking about just talking something really heavy and lifting it. Unlike Apollo 13, it isn’t rocket science.

Instead I’ll just tell you that I made the lift. In those few seconds that he’d psyched me up with those words that real-life NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz had not actually uttered during the Apollo 13 crisis, benching 315 felt almost easy.

“Good job,” he said. “Now do it again.”

“What?”

“You heard me. You don’t want to think this was a fluke, so do it again.”

So I did.

It wasn’t as easy the second time, but I did manage it. I earned my place in the 315 bench press club. Go me.

Oh, and ever since that day I’ve always had the plates facing in.