I coach a lot of strong people. I see PRs most weeks, watch people add weight to bars that used to scare them, and get to be there for the moment it clicks that they’re capable of more than they thought. It’s not a bad way to spend one’s time. But every so often, someone changes your understanding of what strength actually is.

I spent years playing professional basketball, and back then my idea of strength was narrower. It belonged on a court, in a weight room, in the things an athlete could physically do. It wasn’t until coaching became the center of my life, and Starting Strength in particular, that I began to see it differently, and once I did, I started noticing in my mom what had probably been there all along.

She’s about as Canadian as it gets, the version people joke about. Polite to a fault. Reserved. Accommodating. Apologizes for things that aren’t her doing, usually more than once. Over-the-top friendly in a way that somehow never feels fake. If you’ve met her, you already know exactly what I mean. She remembers your name, asks about your week, and actually means it. Nobody has a bad word to say about her. I’ve genuinely never heard one, and I’ve been listening for quite a while now.

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She’s retired, lives part-time in Brussels, and doesn’t have to be at the gym as often as she is. She could be traveling, or doing whatever it is people do once the obligations finally lift. Instead she shows up on her own anyway. Some days she’s doing dishes in the back. Other days she’s just sitting with the dog, or going platform to platform, stacking the fractional plates by size and color, exactly the way she used to organize her classroom. Every so often she shows up with food for me, because she’s decided I don’t have time to eat properly, and then spends the next ten minutes giving me shit for working too much while I eat it. More often than not she’s not even there to train. She’s there because it’s where her family is, and because helping in small, quiet ways is simply who she is.

In 2019, she was diagnosed with cutaneous B-cell lymphoma. If you’ve ever had someone close to you diagnosed with cancer, you know exactly what happens next. You start reading survival statistics you wish you’d never seen. Some of them are reassuring and others are terrifying. It meant three separate blocks of chemotherapy over a stretch of time none of us will forget. We were hoping it would work, the way anyone hopes when someone they love is going through it, but nobody hands you a guarantee. There were appointments, scans, waiting rooms, a nervous kind of quiet that settles over a family when nobody wants to say the wrong thing out loud. She lost her hair, that beautiful blonde hair she’d had my entire life, and she was tired and sick in a way I hadn’t seen from her before.

None of those statistics mattered in the end, because my mom beat it.

Late that year, once treatment finally finished doing its thing, she decided she wanted to get back under a bar. Not because she missed lifting weights but because she wanted to stop letting the cancer decide what her body was capable of.

I still remember the first time I got her back on the platform. She showed up with her hat on, the one she wore to cover what the chemo had taken, we loaded an empty bar and I gave her a hug before she even got set up. That’s the whole memory. There was nothing dramatic about it. No one clapped, no one made a moment out of it, which is exactly how she would have wanted it. She wasn’t chasing a number that day. She was just trying to feel like her body belonged to her again.

That’s the part I think matters most, actually.

It wasn’t really about getting stronger, not at first. It was about not feeling fragile anymore because those are two different things. After chemo, after losing muscle you didn’t choose to lose, after your body has spent months being something that happens to you instead of something you control, strength training gives you back a say in the matter. Nobody was promising her the barbell would stop the cancer from coming back or undo the months of treatment. It couldn’t, and it didn’t. But it was something she could still influence, on a day when very little else felt like hers to influence.

Watching her come back to the barbell changed the way I think about being strong, honestly. I’d always told people strength makes everyday life easier, and that’s true. But I hadn’t fully appreciated the other side of it. When life strips away your physical capacity without asking permission, strength training stops being about performance. It becomes about reclaiming a bit of independence. About proving to yourself, physically, that your body is still capable of adapting to something hard. That’s not a metaphor. It’s just what actually happens when you put a bar in someone’s hands after their body has spent months being acted on instead of acting. It doesn’t matter who the person is or what they’ve been through to get there. The method doesn’t change. Add a little weight, let the body adapt, repeat. It’s almost absurdly simple, and that simplicity is exactly why it works for everyone who actually does it.

Then COVID got in the way, as it did for everyone. Eventually we got back to it, this time at Brussels Barbell, the first affiliate gym in Europe. By then, I’d unknowingly built exactly the sort of place she needed, so she started showing up there too. The empty bar became a slightly heavier one, and before long we were adding plates again. None of it happened fast, because it wasn’t supposed to.

Even after all these years of coaching, I’m still struck by how simple the Starting Strength method is. Squatting, deadlifting, pressing and pulling. Basic human movements, loaded a little more over time. Nothing complicated about any of it, and yet I’ve never once gotten used to what it does to people. You’d think after coaching thousands of folks through it, the novelty would wear off. It hasn’t. Watching someone return to those movements after their body has been taken apart by something like chemo, and seeing what that process does for them, not just physically but mentally too, still gives me pause.

Before long she wasn’t just training again. She was back encouraging everyone else in the room too, exactly like she always had, with the same genuine smile she probably used on her students when they cleaned up their desks or put their shoes away properly. She’d ask new lifters how their week was going, or tell someone else their squat looked good (with zero qualifications to make such a statement). She got stronger, and more than that, she stopped feeling breakable. It’s funny how quickly people forget. Before long the cancer stopped being the first thing anyone thought about when they saw her. She was just my mom again.

I wish that were the end of the story, but it wasn’t. The years since haven’t given her much of a break. In 2022, she lost her mother. A year later, she lost her son, my older brother Jeff, forty-five years old, gone. I don’t really know what to say after that.

Cancer was hard. Cancer nearly killed her. But if you asked my mom to rank the worst things that have happened to her, I don’t think there’d be any contest. Losing your first-born child isn’t something you’re supposed to have to survive. There’s an order things are meant to happen in, parents first, then children, decades apart, and when it happens backwards it breaks something that doesn’t really get put back together. It just gets carried differently.

He left behind a wife and three kids, but my mom didn’t just lose her son. She watched her grandchildren become kids who will spend the rest of their lives explaining why their dad isn’t in the photos, why he wasn’t at the graduation, why he won’t be at the wedding. Every one of those moments that hasn’t happened yet will still have him missing from it, and my mom knows that better than any of us. She watched her daughter-in-law become a widow at an age when she shouldn’t have had to know that word, and she watched my sister and me lose our older brother, the person we had looked up to since we were kids. Each of those losses was different, and she had to carry all of them alongside her own.

And still, somewhere in the middle of grieving her own mother and then her own son inside the same year, she kept coming back to the one place where showing up was still entirely her decision. Not because it fixed anything, but because those grandkids still needed a grandma who was standing, and because every time she walked into the gym, there was still one thing life hadn’t managed to take from her. She could still decide to put another plate on the bar.

That would have been enough for one lifetime, but it wasn’t the end either. A year after that, her sister and best friend of a lifetime had a massive heart attack in the middle of a Yoga class. She survived it, technically. She’s been in full-time care ever since, and by now everyone in the family has quietly accepted that she isn’t coming home. My mom lost her too. She just doesn’t get to grieve it the way you grieve a death, because there’s still a person to visit, still a hand to hold, even if the sister she grew up with isn’t really in the room anymore.

These days she’s got an artificial knee, an arthritic hip that will be replaced in three weeks, and enough sleepless nights behind her to last a lifetime. If anyone in this gym had an excuse to stay home, to sit a few years out, to decide she’d earned a break after everything the last several years handed her, it would be her. Nobody would question it. Instead, she shows up anyway and trains twice a week like clockwork. Walks in smiling, greets people by name before she’s even put her bag down, asks about your week before you’ve had the chance to ask about hers. Every time.

Her program doesn’t look like everyone else’s, and it hasn’t for a while. The hip won’t let her pull from the floor anymore, so she rack pulls instead, and on her seventy-fifth birthday, with the replacement still looming, she rack-pulled 80 kilos, a PR. The knee cannot flex enough for her to squat below parallel, so she squats to a box we set for her, and she’s gotten stronger doing that too. Some days her shoulder won’t let her bench, so she inclines instead, pain free, as long as it’s not a day she’s also pressing overhead. None of it looks like the program on the wall but it’s work and she is getting stronger. All of it still counts.

And somehow, no matter what’s going on with the hip and the knee, she’s still going to make sure her shirt matches her leggings, her leggings match her shoes, and her belt is the right color to tie the whole thing together. God forbid she train looking anything less than put together. Meanwhile her son, who owns the place, shows up to train looking like he got dressed in the dark and lost a fight with a pile of dirty laundry. Every time she sees me she says some version of the same thing. “Honey, I love you, but do you think maybe it’s time to get some new pants?”

None of it looks like effort, but it is. People see the smile, but I see someone who just keeps showing up despite all the shit that’s going on in her life. It’s a choice she’s making, over and over, on a bad hip and a body that has every reason to complain. I’ll catch myself bitching about being tired, or having too much on my plate, or some minor ache from training, and then I’ll remember she did three rounds of chemo, buried her own son, and still shows up smiling with everything perfectly color-coordinated, and whatever I was about to complain about quietly stops feeling worth mentioning.

I think about that a lot, actually – how many people walk through this gym carrying something nobody else can see. A diagnosis. A bereavement. Worry about a parent, or a child, or a marriage that isn’t going the way it should. Most of us have no idea what the person warming up next to us is dealing with. But I notice who keeps showing up anyway, and my mom is the clearest example of that I have ever seen, mostly because I’ve had a front row seat to all of it.

People sometimes tell me my mom is strong because of everything she’s been through. I don’t think that’s quite right. Plenty of people go through hard things. What she did with it is different. Every single time life took something away from her, she quietly went back to rebuilding what she still could. Then she came back to the gym and did it again.

She just kept showing up.

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