I’m a Fat Athlete. Endgame Thor was an Inspiration.
WARNING: A detail from Avengers: Endgame that’s specific enough to be considered a spoiler by most standards is the foundation of this piece. While the Russo Brothers have declared it’s OK to talk about spoilers starting May 6, no details that are truly vital to the plot of the film will be discussed. Please proceed with caution if you haven’t seen Endgame.
There are many shocking moments in Avengers: Endgame. One of the most shocking (and arguably the most surprising) comes within the first hour or so when it is revealed that, in the aftermath of the snap felt around the universe, Thor had let himself go.
It was a brutal sight to see Thor transformed into someone who looked like he never stopped celebrating the night he scored four touchdowns in one high school football game. The once mighty God of Thunder had packed on more than a few pounds thanks to a new beer and pizza diet and a lifestyle that didn’t have him straying far from the couch.
Fat Thor’s introduction was equal parts hilarious and gross thanks to Chris Hemsworth’s brilliant performance and the Russo Brothers making sure that everyone got a good look at all the details of the fat suit that encapsulated Hemsworth’s chiseled body. At our sold out screening at the Chinese Theatre, the reaction from the audience alternated between laughs and groans depending on what exactly was shown on the massive IMAX screen.
The scene took me all the way back to when Pulp Fiction made its theatrical debut. Every time I saw it in the theatre (which was a lot), there would be scattered groans when John Travolta’s Vincent Vega took off his shirt to be hosed down by The Wolf. Discovering a former heartthrob suddenly had a dad bod is not what those people paid for. Needles through the heart, yes. Love handles, no. If memes existed in the mid ’90s, there’s no doubt Tubby Travolta would have become one.
Here in 2019 though, any Fat Thor memes have been replaced by Fat Thor think pieces.
Last week, I read several from authors who had no qualms about sharing essays and Twitter threads as long as CVS receipts as soon as they walked out of Endgame. Among the “woke” subset of the internet, it seemed like there was an unspoken competition to see who could be the most woke.
The major outrage themes fell into three buckets: Thor was fat shamed, fat people should not be comic relief, and fat suits are offensive (my personal favorite because nothing that I read addressed whether it would have acceptable had Hemsworth gained weight to play Fat Thor).
Seriously, people were mad that a genetically engineered space raccoon was busting his buddy’s chops for putting on some pounds or that Tony Stark called him Lebowski, a funny throwaway line that merely confirmed what anyone aware of the existence of The Dude would have been thinking about for the previous five minutes. And yes, I know Thor got fat because he turned to food and an ocean’s worth of beer as way to cope with half the living creatures in the universe being turned to dust on his watch.
However, what I finally saw on the big screen after sitting through 21 previous Marvel movies was someone who looked like me- a bearded fat guy who likes to drink beer and play video games and has a complicated relationship food, my go-to in moments of triumph or depression and many in-between.
While I might have a photo of a McRib (the greatest food ever invented) as my phone’s wallpaper, I also have a box full of trophies and medals (not all the participant kind) from more than two decades as a “fat” endurance sport athlete.
Before we get to that let’s take a quick trip down fat kid memory lane…
I first learned I was fat during a sleepover at my buddy Jake’s house in the 6th grade. An epic night of watching Revenge of the Nerds II on VHS and playing Test Drive on his dad’s Commodore 64 was winding down so we changed into our pajamas. His reaction when I took off my shirt remains seared into my brain.
“Whoa. I didn’t know you were fat. You’ve got a gut. Do the truffle shuffle.”
Now here’s the thing. Had the term skinny fat been around in 1988, Jake might have called me that but since it didn’t, he went for the only available option- good old fat.
For nearly three years I’d thought of myself as more of a Mouth but what if I was really a Chunk?
Suddenly, I felt like I’d been harboring a dark secret under the hood of my Ocean Pacific t-shirts.
Every year in PE class I’d come close to earning the coveted Presidential Fitness Patch but would always be done in by the sit and reach plus a bonus failure like coming up a few inches short on the standing broad jump or taking a second too long on the shuttle run.
I’d always been a little doughy around the middle but it wasn’t like I was THE fat kid at school. I played YMCA basketball, AYSO Soccer, Little League, tennis, earned a yellow belt in Taekwondo (like every kid who saw the Karate Kid) and was on the swim team for a couple years until my eyesight became so bad (-10.5 in each eye) that I couldn’t handle being blind at practice and meets without my glasses.
I was never the best on a team but was good enough to have played tennis and baseball through high school and was even recruited to play college ball.
(Full disclosure: the extent of my “recruitment” was receiving a pamphlet in the mail and the college was smaller than my high school. But I was proud. Somewhere out there was a college coach who just might have seen my name in his local paper after the heroic story of my game winning pinch hit was picked up by the Associated Press despite being buried on page three of our hometown paper’s sports section.)
In college, the nickname Chunk was bestowed upon me by new friends and teammates on the ultimate frisbee team (laugh all you want but there’s a LOT of running in that sport) and I got my first “real” bicycle (a sweet Trek mountain bike) and discovered that the slow twitch muscles in my legs that made me a loser in the standing broad jump were actually good for something. I soon got a road bike and became a leg shaving racer.
The only problem (which has been a “problem” for more than 20 years) is that no matter how many miles I rack up or meals I skip, the extra pounds I carry refuse to come off. I can melt most of them away but not all of them. Even at my skinniest, I’m still considered fat in a sport where an athlete’s power-to-weight ratio is everything and I know I have the power because a $1,500 wattage meter on my bike that allows me to analyze training data just like the pros tells me so.
When it comes to endurance sports, the fate of an athlete’s potential is determined by their genetics. Even with doping, every winner of the Tour de France has had some attribute that made them more of a genetic freak than the competition. If you didn’t win the lottery in the womb, there’s only so far you can go.
For me, that has meant a competitive cycling career filled with a lot of great friendships, memories, and personal achievements that can be summed up as being really good at being mediocre. To put that into golf terms, it’d be like being stuck in a purgatory of never breaking 80 in a round, a score that’s good enough to beat a lot of golfers but won’t have you qualifying for the US Open anytime soon.
What I’ve done though is accept my situation and make the best of it and that’s exactly what the Avengers did with Fat Thor. They may have teased him plenty (as true friends are wont to do) but they didn’t banish him from the team until he training montaged his way back into traditional superhero shape. They knew he was still Thor under all that gooey Asgardian flesh and they accepted him for who he was.
And the Russo brothers deserve a lot of credit for not putting Fat Thor through a training montage. No matter what Rocky IV has taught us, training isn’t a montage. It’s a lonely grind. A few years ago, my younger brother, who is built like Thor, excels at any sport he plays, and earns his living as a neurosurgeon (welcome to my world), threw down the gauntlet and challenged me to do a Half Ironman Triathlon. That’s a 1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike ride, and 13 mile run.
I trained like I never had before, sticking to a strict workout schedule and even stricter diet, going so far as to do questionable things like 10 mile evening runs followed by a glass of water for dinner along with a shot of Nyquil to help sleep through the hunger pains in hopes of waking up a pound or two lighter the next morning.
When race day came, I stood on the shore of Lake Michigan the fittest I’d been in a very long time but was still only a few Chipotle burritos away from being eligible for the Clydesdale category (the woke folk would shit if they knew that heavier men and women can choose to compete as a “Clydesdale” or “Athena”) but there wasn’t time to dwell on the extra pounds I was carrying compared to the rest of the field. The hay was in the barn and the race was about to start.
When the time comes to go out there and kick some ass, be it the ass of my brother or Thanos, you gotta run what you brung and do the best you can with what you got.
And that’s exactly what Fat Thor did.
