'Character Limit' author Kate Conger on how lifting helped her write
Today I have a special treat in store: We are joined by intrepid New York Times reporter Kate Conger, whose book Character Limit (co-written with intrepid New York Times reporter Ryan Mac) is out this week. Character Limit traces the disaster circus that ensued when Elon Musk joked about buying Twitter, and then found out Twitter could sue him if he did not follow through with his joke, and had to buy Twitter even though he did not want to. And that was just the beginning! I have not yet finished it, but esteemed friends of the newsletter have, and I’m assured that the reporting takes you into so many rooms with Elon, giving the reader a true front-row seat to his idiocy.
What all does this have to do with She’s A Beast? Well, there I was, palling around on Bluesky, as is my wont, when Kate mentioned that she started lifting as part of her book-writing process. In her words: “All I did was lift.” That’s right: Kate is a fellow Lunkhead. I called Kate to talk to her more about the beautiful interplay she found between slanging heavy weights and writing the definitive tome on Elon’s Folly.
Casey: I thought a good place to start might be how you got started with lifting. Was it before you started writing, or during?
Kate: No, it was basically the exact same time. I had a friend who does personal training work, Berto, and he had reached out to me in January of 2023 a couple of months before I started writing the book and was like, hey, like you should come in and train with me. And I was like, [air of disdain] yeah, dude. I had a lot of preconceived notions about what weight lifting was like. I belonged to gyms in the past and felt like the weight room was just kind of a meat market for gym bros, and it was not a place for me. Even on social media, so much of the fitness content you see out there is very alpha-male-focused.
And then I started my book leave in April of 2023, and was just staring down the barrel of three months locked alone in my house trying to write a book. It’s my first book, I was taking on this difficult project that I've never done before and had no idea how to do. I was going togo fully feral unless I had some kind of schedule to orient myself during that time. I thought it would be helpful for me to do something else that seemed out of my comfort zone and challenging, just to give myself the reminder that it's possible.
So I ended up going back to Berto and I was like, okay, I'm going to come in and I'll try lifting with you, because I need a book-writing hobby. He told me he had learned everything that he knew from his wife who's also a personal trainer, so it set the tone right off the bat of this being about honoring and supportive of women being involved. I went in the one time, like, I'm going to try it, I’m not necessarily going to love it, but it'll be an interesting bit for me to commit to. And then I … I ended up loving it.
What did you like about it? Did you enjoy the training itself? Or the outside effects of it?
I'd always been a runner before, and so I think I was very lower-body dominant and really did not have a ton of upper-body strength. I look back at old gym videos where I was working on bench press and literally just pressing the bar with no weight on it (ed. note: I could not even do this when I started…). Now I'm working on 135, I'm between 128 and 135. And that's so fun, to see the progress on that is really exciting, especially coming into it really not having any upper-body strength to speak of.
You probably have heard this from a lot of women who have not lifted before and then start, but I was like, it's going to be too hard for me. It was real fun and exciting to be able to blow through some of that and be like, oh, actually I can lift heavy, and I can get strong, and I can do all of these things that I didn't think I could do or I didn't think were tailored to my interests.
Kate benching with BertoKate and K
How did you feel like it helped with your book writing?
It's such a nice contrast to doing journalism work, which is so quiet and sedentary, and I'm just sitting around at my laptop. I can really get stuck in procrastination doom loop, where I'm just staring down a blank page all day and getting progressively more anxious and not actually writing anything.
But starting the day with lifting, I've already been productive and I can keep that train moving, as opposed to just sitting on my couch in a cold sweat. I get to go for an hour and have a really good time and feel really strong, see my friends, socialize at the gym. I think it definitely checked some of the boxes that I was looking for for book leave in terms of getting a set schedule, getting around people who weren't Ryan, my writing partner.
The thing I really like about running is the mental clarity that you get, but when I'm running the first mile or two, it's just kind of all jumbling thoughts in my brain, and it takes a bit to settle out into that calmer, more focused zone. But I think you can get there a lot faster with lifting, it was more exaggerated. Like I would go in the morning, lift, and then come back and just feel like very alive and ready to write.
It really is like the highlight of my day. Working on cracking 135 right now, I’ll go for my big push day and be like, okay, make sure you eat really well the night before and try to get good sleep!
Speaking of Ryan, let’s not leave him out of this: Was or is he on this wavelength at all?
He's more of a soccer player. That's his big thing. But he lifts a little bit. I would say that Ryan is on the bro spectrum, for sure. We went on a writer's retreat together in September or October of 2023 on an island off the coast of Seattle, he drove up, and I flew up and met him. But he came by my house and got my weights on the way up, and brought them up to Seattle for me, so that I could lift while we were on the island together. Which is really sweet. I was like, thank you so much for committing to my weight-lifting lifestyle here.
Bros supporting bros: We adore to see it. Thank so much for lunkheading with She’s A Beast, Kate, and congrats again on the debut of Character Limit!!
Peruse, if you will, some of our other past interviews with strong folks:
Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston
Eat
~Liftcord Pick of the Week: [Morpheus voice] “What could it mean to give yourself the food you need to keep going? No punishing, no guilt, no withholding. Just nourishment.”~
Australians are training in “squads.” This feels like people charging high membership fees for lowercase-c crossfit, but if any Australians would like to weigh in in the comments…
Protein popsicles: I’d try it!
Come for just the visual of older people being trained to fall safely with judo/jiu-jitsu techniques, stay for the BBC narration that opens with a guy just saying the word “falling,” like they are sugar gliders in a nature documentary.
Enjoyed this piece on embracing mid-night insomnia, as a mid-night insomniac. Another comforting tidbit I cling to is that this kind of insomnia, “two sleeps,” was just kinda normal going back to ancient Greece, all the way to the medieval times. 3 a.m. is a perfect time to go outside and appreciate the stillness of the night, and if standing out there freaks out and upsets your neighbors, so much the better! Always keep ‘em guessing, I say.
Drink
Last week, I expressed some skepticism of the “body roundness index” as a useful replacement for BMI. Good science can move kind of slowly, so sometimes it can take a while for a bad-on-its-face idea to reveal itself as also bad in practice.
However, in this case, we didn’t have to wait long, because new research shows that the belly fat of people who exercise does not present the same health risks as that of people who do not. Even with the same amount of body fat and controlling for age and sex, exercisers’ body fat had more beneficial proteins and more blood vessels, and showed the capacity to store even more fat, which could mean less fat gets stored around the organs even if it is gained.
We’ve noted before the big difference in mortality between people who do or don’t exercise, regardless of their body size. Seems like body roundness will not capture health any better than BMI, to me, but I’m just a humble iron wench—
Okay look, I’m on record that there is not enough research done on women’s health. No one believes this more than me. And, when you do research, you find what you find. However, I have to raise a flag on the fact that research on women’s health always seems to be finding new ways that women suck, and I don’t think this is just my crazy woman imagination. Here is a story from this week about how pregnancy changes women’s brains by, wait for it, shrinking certain regions in size.
By the ninth week of pregnancy, the authors found widespread decreases in gray matter volume and thickness of the cerebral cortex, especially in regions such as the default mode network, which is associated with social cognitive functions. Gray matter is an essential brain tissue that controls sensations and functions such as speech, thinking and memory.
Come ON. I guess it’s not all bad:
The scans also showed increases in cerebrospinal fluid and white matter microstructure in the second and third trimesters, all of which were linked with rising levels of the hormones estradiol and progesterone. Cerebrospinal fluid helps provide nourishment, protection and waste removal for the brain. White matter helps areas of the brain communicate and process information.
Women’s Pregnancy Brains: More Efficient? Women’s Pregnancy Brains: Leaner and Meaner? Pregnant Women More Able to Focus and Think After Pregnancy Has Purged All That Extraneous Gossip You Still Remember From Seventh Grade? I’d love just one W! Let’s frontload the W, just once.
A “dopamine fast” will not save you from addiction, just like not living in Las Vegas will not cure you of a gambling addiction.
The U.S. Open crowd is “too much” now. As someone of “general admission at the Saratoga race track” experience, rubbing shoulders with farmers’-tanned guys in cutoff shirts sitting on their coolers drinking BLs and, literally, a very wasted Bobby Flay, I have a hard time condemning this kind of thing.
Rest
A 1987 investigative story from the Chicago Reader about murderers who get into apartments in housing projects via holes in the walls behind medicine cabinets. Why am I into creepy things lately? Supposedly this story is somewhat the basis for Candyman. (And the writer has a very credible theory about that. It involves none other than John Malkovich.)
"The Divorce Tapes," extremely well-written story.
"TikTok is the platform that has almost killed me."
"Streaming is an affront to God." (I have to say from experience that it is refreshing to at least mix it up once in a while.)
I’m reading the book The Life of the Mind and greatly enjoying. “Minutely observed fiction on the everyday mundane” can often feel tiresome and claustrophobic, but this book makes me realize that when the minute observations are astute and true, it’s very enjoyable and funny. (Also it’s short, and I’ve been surrounded by doorstops lately).
Longtimers know I’m not one for podcasts, but I really enjoyed this Ezra Klein ep with Jia Tolentino on Cocomelon and how the psychedelic experience relates to parenthood, and also being a child.
That’s all for this week! I love you for reading, thank you, let’s go—
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