#full beard

Chapter 8 – The Stage

Competition day began while it was still dark.

Barney slept surprisingly calmly. The alarm rang exactly when it was supposed to and he got up without hesitation. Everything had been prepared the evening before. The meal boxes, drinks, competition number, posing trunks, towel and gym bag stood lined up beside the door. Every movement had its place. Every step its reason. He was not nervous. He felt only a strange calm, as if the entire past year had been assembling itself precisely for this single day.

A few days before the contest he had opened the diary to a page he had so far overlooked. There was no training plan or meal schedule on it. Instead there followed several notes about appearance. Barney read them with the same trust as all the previous advice.

*Your face is already distinctive enough. Shorten the sides. Leave the height on top. Your jaw will look wider. Your neck stronger. Your shoulders even more massive.*

Beneath the text came a short note.

*Leave the full beard. Only tidy the lines.*

It had never occurred to him before that a haircut could change the impression of a physique. Still, he booked an appointment with the same barber he had been seeing for the last few months. When he looked into the mirror after the cut was finished he felt larger than ever before. Not because he had packed on muscle overnight. Everything had simply come together into one whole.

The final preparation was less pleasant.

In the salon that specialised in competitors he was greeted by a woman with the smile of an experienced professional. A single glance through the unzipped hoodie was enough for her to shake her head in amusement.

“You’re going to be work.”

Barney smiled.

“That bad?”

“Let’s just say nature really didn’t hold back on you.”

Her eyes travelled over the dense growth on his chest, shoulders, back and arms.

“I won’t lie to you. This is going to hurt.”

Barney only shrugged.

“If it has to be.”

A few dozen minutes later he was no longer so calm.

Every successive strip of wax burned more than the last. His skin turned red and the muscles tensed involuntarily. When it came to the shoulders and back he could not hold back a short hiss.

The woman smiled apologetically.

“I told you. And wait until it starts growing back. If you keep getting this hairy, you won’t like me much.”

Barney took a deep breath.

“Doesn’t matter.”

She was surprised by how calmly he said it.

“It’s simply the price of success.”

In reality he did not think about it a moment longer. When he looked in the mirror that evening the smooth skin highlighted every muscle. For the first time he fully saw how enormous a stretch of road he had covered.

Backstage at the contest a strange chaos reigned. Competitors coated in stage colour hurried everywhere; someone was pumping with a resistance band, another was nervously eating rice cakes with honey. Barney watched it all with the calm of a man who was still earning his place. Only a year earlier he would have looked like a visitor among them. Today he was one of them.

When his number was called he stepped onto the stage.

The lights were stronger than he had expected.

He could barely see the audience.

He heard only the voice of the judge and his own breathing.

One pose.

Another.

A turn.

A smile.

Everything he had repeated in front of the mirror for the last months came completely naturally.

When the contest was over he sat beside Miro and together they waited for the results.

Third place.

He paused for a moment.

Then he smiled.

It was not a victory.

It was not a defeat either.

It was a beginning.

On the winners’ podium he gripped the trophy in both hands and, looking out into the hall, felt no disappointment. On the contrary. A single thought ran through his head.

Next time I will be better.

Miro clapped him on the shoulder after the announcement.

“For a first contest? That’s a damn good result.”

Barney nodded.

“Next time I’ll go higher.”

There was no pride in it.

Only a simple statement of fact.

That evening he arrived home tired but satisfied. He placed the trophy on the table and next to it the old diary.

The cover showed the worn corners, the yellowed pages and the fingerprints of the last months.

He opened it.

On the penultimate page stood a single paragraph.

---

*Congratulations.*

*You did it.*

*Your body is ready.*

*Your mind will no longer stand in the way.*

*Now you can finally live the way nature intended.*

---

Barney read the lines slowly.

He smiled.

They seemed completely natural to him.

He turned the last leaf.

On the back there was no more text.

Only the title.

**From Nerd to /Champ/ Chimp**

The word *Champ* had been crossed out with a single stroke of the pen.

The ink was as old as the rest of the page.

It had not been added later.

It had not been corrected.

It had been there from the very beginning.

Barney looked at it for a while.

Then he closed the diary.

It did not occur to him for a single moment to wonder why he had never noticed it before.

He laid his hand on the trophy.

A contented smile appeared on his face.

Outside, dawn was slowly breaking.

His story was not over.

It was only just beginning.

Chapter 7 – Preparation

Preparation for the contest changed everything.

Until then training had been part of Barney’s life. Now his life became part of the training. Every day had a precisely set order that repeated with almost military precision. The alarm rang at the same hour, the first meal followed within a few minutes, and the whole day unfolded according to the schedule written on the fridge. Training, food, work only to the most necessary degree, rest, another meal, further preparation. Time stopped being divided into hours. He divided it according to individual meals and training sessions.

The volume of food was absurd.

Boxes filled almost the entire fridge and more piled up in the freezer. Rice, chicken, beef, eggs, oats, cottage cheese. Every bite had its reason. Every gram was calculated. At first he ate because he was hungry. Later he ate because it stood in the plan. And in the end he had the feeling that the hunger never really ended. Barely had he finished one portion when his body demanded another within a few hours. Previously he had looked forward to good food. Now he looked forward to ticking off the next item of the day.

The workouts were equally relentless. Weights that only a few months earlier had seemed unimaginable had become a normal part of every week. Miro had to hold Barney back more and more often. Not because his technique was failing. On the contrary. The biggest problem was that he constantly felt like adding another set, another repetition or another plate to the bar. He felt inexhaustible. When others left for home tired, he was wondering whether he could still work the shoulders a little more.

He thought of almost nothing else.

The bookcase in the living room had turned into an ordinary piece of furniture. He opened the laptop only for the few remaining commissions he kept out of habit. His phone was full of photos of meals, training videos and notes about his weight. Even his dreams began to change. He dreamed of the competition stage, of the lights and of finally standing among the people he wanted to resemble.

One Sunday he went to his parents’ for lunch.

His mother hugged him as always, but this time she paused for a moment.

“You’re even bigger than last time.”

Barney only smiled.

“That’s good.”

His father studied him in silence a little longer. When Barney took off his hoodie it was clearly visible through the T-shirt how broad his shoulders had become. His neck had thickened enough to look almost as wide as his head. The dense full beard and strong jaw made him a completely different man from the one they remembered only a year earlier.

Lunch proceeded calmly, but his mother several times caught the short look she exchanged with his father.

In the end she could not hold it in.

“Barney…”

She hesitated for a second.

The name did not come entirely naturally to her lips.

“Bartholomew… are you really all right?”

He nodded.

“Of course.”

“Don’t you think you’re overdoing it a bit?”

He raised his eyebrows in genuine incomprehension.

“With what?”

“With everything. With the training… with the food…”

She hesitated again.

“…and you’re not under pressure from someone at the gym, are you? Or… taking something?”

Silence settled over the room.

Barney smiled for the first time since the beginning of the meal.

It was not mockery.

More genuine surprise.

“Mum, no.”

He searched for the right words for a moment.

“I just found myself.”

He looked from one parent to the other.

“I’ve never been happier.”

And it was the truth.

He could not remember the last time he had woken up without the desire to get out of bed. He could not remember the last time he had doubted what he wanted to do. For the first time in his life he felt that every day was leading exactly where it should.

His mother nodded.

She smiled.

But uncertainty remained in her eyes.

On the way to the kitchen she quietly whispered to her husband:

“I just hope there’s nothing more to it.”

His father did not answer.

He only looked at his son once more.

Such a rapid transformation did not make sense.

That evening on the way home Barney stopped at a petrol station. At the till he bumped into a former university classmate.

“Holy shit! Bartholomew? Is that really you?”

Barney smiled.

“Long time no see.”

They talked for a while about work, about life and about what each of them was doing. In the end the classmate laughed.

“Hey… do you still read that much? What’s actually your favourite book?”

Barney opened his mouth.

He thought.

Only empty outlines of titles appeared in his head.

He knew he had once read hundreds of them.

Yet he could not grasp a single one.

Five seconds.

Ten.

Fifteen.

“I…”

He stopped.

“I don’t even know any more.”

The classmate only laughed.

“Happens.”

They said goodbye and each went his own way.

Barney thought about the question for a few more minutes.

Then his phone reminded him that he had another meal in forty minutes.

The memory of books vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

He arrived home exactly according to plan.

Chapter 6 – Barney

The needle of the scale first stopped at ninety-eight kilograms. A few days later it showed ninety-nine and a half. Bart only smiled. A year earlier he would have considered a number like that a catastrophe. Today he saw it as confirmation that everything he was doing was right. When, one Monday morning, the display finally read 100.1 kg, he simply stared at the figure for a while. No euphoria washed over him, no surprise. Only a calm sense that he had arrived where he was meant to be.

The following weeks continued at the same pace. It was as if his body had stopped recognising the limits that applied to everyone else. His shoulders widened almost before his eyes and every new T-shirt began to stretch across his chest within a few weeks. His neck thickened enough that he had to leave the top buttons of shirts undone that he had once worn without difficulty. When he shaved in the mornings he caught himself more and more often putting the razor aside in the end. The full beard no longer looked like several days’ stubble. It was dense, continuous and distinctly changed his face. The jaw that had once been hidden behind a narrow face acquired firm lines and, together with the more powerful neck, gave him an appearance that commanded respect even before he spoke.

Meanwhile the body hair continued to spread. A continuous layer of dark hair covered his chest and ran across the shoulders onto the upper part of his back. When dressing he paid it almost no attention. Only occasionally did he have to brush a few loose hairs from his beard off a shirt where they had clung to the fabric. If he had looked at photographs taken a few months earlier he would probably have struggled to believe his own transformation. Yet he was changing every day. And precisely because of that, no single day felt exceptional.

At the gym no one had thought of him as Bartholomew for a long time. Not even as Bart. One evening he finished a heavy set of squats, racked the bar, and from the far end of the hall came an amused shout.

“Move over a bit, Barney! Make some room!”

Several people laughed.

Bart turned.

“Why Barney?” he asked with a smile.

Miro shrugged.

“Don’t know. You’re just… Barney.”

“Yeah,” Petr added. “It suits you.”

Bart laughed briefly.

“All right then.”

And that was the end of it.

The next day they called him that again. Within a week almost no one used any other name. When, a few days later, he introduced himself to a new member of the gym, it came out completely naturally.

“Hi. I’m Barney.”

Only several seconds afterwards did he realise he had not said Bart.

Nor Bartholomew.

It did not strike him as strange at all.

His old life was receding just as unobtrusively as the glasses that still lay on the shelf at home. The laptop remained closed most of the time. The shelves full of books began to gather a fine layer of dust. By contrast the fridge was perfectly organised, the boxes of prepared food lined up side by side according to the days, and he knew the training plan almost by heart. When he once happened to rest his gaze on the university diploma hanging on the wall, he had to think for a moment which period it actually came from. It felt like a memory of someone else.

After one of the Friday sessions Miro sat down beside him with a flyer in his hand.

“County amateur contest in two months.”

Barney took the flyer.

On the cover photograph stood a bearded competitor with a massive chest and broad shoulders. Only a few months earlier he would have thought he would never look like that.

This time a different thought occurred to him.

I can do this.

“Do you think I should go for it?” he asked.

Miro did not hesitate for a second.

“I think if you didn’t enter it would be a waste.”

Barney walked home in silence.

That evening he sat down at the table, opened the diary and turned to the next page.

No new training plan.

No table.

No explanation.

In the middle of the page stood a single sentence.

*Enter.*

He looked at it for a long time.

Then he quietly closed the diary.

On the table beside him lay the contest flyer.