 by Nigel Andrews "I felt like Leonardo Da Vinci. I was a sculptor sculpting the body." There are several different versions of how Arnold came to bodybuilding: not least from the man himself. The most scenic occurs in his book "Arnold's Fitness for Kids, Ages Birth to Five". At age fourteen he recalls, he used to play with friends at the village lake. They would chase each other along the shore, or have swimming races, or dive to the lake floor to collect mud for mud-fights. More and more, Arnold noticed the older, bigger boys who worked out with weights and did exercises. He remembers staring at them and thinking "how wonderful it must be to have a body like theirs." Soon he asked them to teach him; he wanted to be able to do more "chin-ups" than any of them. The better-known story, also from Arnold's own mouth, was that he started working out with weights as part of football training: his coach decided that lifting weights for an hour once a week would be a good way to condition the boys for playing soccer. In another version he was in the school gym and saw a magazine featuring Mr. Universe pictures. "It fascinated me. I decided that was the way to be different." It could be none or one or all of these stories, swirling around in the myth mixer of Arnold's head. But however the boy actually opened the door to his first vocation, there was no doubting the Damascene light shining inside. During his first visit to the bodybuilding gym he remembered the weight lifters shining with sweat and their powerful Herculean looks. There it was before him - "my life, the answer I'd been seeking." Soon the self-obsessed mystique of bodybuilding was spreading through Arnold like a virus. For him it was a way to escape team sports, "I disliked it when we won a game and I didn't get personal recognition", ", and develop a romance with his body and his power to shape it. "The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that. That's why I went into bodybuilding in the first place. It was the idea of taking the risk by yourself rather than with a whole team." In due course Arnold was waving aside the horrified reaction of his parents to sculpt the body beautiful.  Aurelia: "Why, Arnold, why do you want to do it to yourself?" Gustav: "What will you do with all these muscles once you've got them?" Arnold: "I want to be the best-built man in the world. Then I want to go to America and be in movies." Gustav: "I think we better go to the doctor with this one, he's sick in the head." But with Arnold's body swelling by the minute, piggyback rides over the mountain to Graz were a whole new proposition. And if the boy was sick in his head, he seemed to be possessed of a startling clarity of thought and purpose. Where fellow iron-pumpers trained two or three times a week, Arnold trained daily. Where others packed in around dinnertime, Arnold would be there in the Graz gym until ten in the evening. After his first workout he started riding home and fell off his bike. "I was so weak I couldn't make my hands hold on," he writes in his autobiography. "I had no feeling in my legs: they were noodles. I was numb, my whole body buzzing." Arnold's boyhood trainer was Kurt Marnul. The reigning Mr. Austria and future Mr. Europe 1965 had founded the Athletic Union Graz in the late 1950s: the town's only weightlifting gym, located under a concrete stand in the town's football stadium. Marnul had built his own weight-machines there, based on pictures he had seen in American bodybuilding magazines. Marnul met Arnold in 1961, introduced by a mutual friend, a schoolteacher, at the Thalersee. At first the new mentor saw more promise in the boy's older brother. "Arnold was tall but thin," he remembers. "Meinhard looked much more like a potential bodybuilder" Meinhard though, had no powers of discipline or application, while his brother seemed to have both. "The first day Arnold trained," Marnul recalls, "he said, "I will be Mr Universe." He trained six, sometimes seven days a week, about three hours a day. Within three to four years he had put on twenty kilos of pure muscle." The Graz gym was closed on Sundays, says Marnul, but Arnold would break in by forcing open a window. Usually he missed the last bus home, so he would walk back or his trainer would give him a lift on his motorbike. Back at home his mother was more tolerant than his father of the boy's new fad. "She said she'd rather he trained three hours a day then be in bars and restaurants or smoking or taking drugs or being with women," recalls Marnul. A regime of conspiratorial acceptance set in. "After he had finished his preparation for school and thought his father was asleep," remembers Aurelia, Arnold would hitchhike down the mountains to the soccer stadium." After a few hours' heaving and humping he would come home, "arriving in the early light to be picked up by a tank that took him to school. It was an American tank, because they were still occupying Austria and Arnold was very friendly with the soldiers." (This must have been a rogue American tank; locals today insist that the area was under British occupation at that time).  In those early iron-pumping years Marnul was astonished at his pupil's zeal and progress. There were so early signs of Arnold's expertise at gamesmanship. The one weakness Marnul remembers in the boy's early development was his stomach. "You're supposed to have three muscles showing there, but Arnold only had two. However much he trained, he couldn't get that third muscle, so he used to stand like this when he posed." Marnul mimes, holding an arm in a shielding position across this stomach. To help boost the swelling body, Marnul introduced Arnold to steroids, which were then legal. Back in the early 1960s, the trainer claims, "There was no weightlifter in the world who did not take them. You could get prescriptions for them from the doctor. Arnold never took them, though, without my super-vision."  Marnul says he learned about steroids from famed bodybuilder Steve Reeves. That name brings us to another energizing influence on Arnold: the imagery, which inspired him: The pictures in the magazines and movie-house. |