Steve Lowe, from left, and Ron May spot Zach Marrs as Marrs does a series of squats with more than 360 pounds. Marrs is co-owner of Olympic Iron Gym, 520 E. 22nd Terrace, where several competitive weightlifters work out.

Ron May talks about the old days as his voice competes with the clanking of heavy iron on weight bars and heavy metal on a speaker system.

He tells about how he used to be a college cross-country runner — at 6-foot-2 and 155 pounds.

Those may be the old days, but they’re not the good old days. In this season where it seems everybody is vowing to lose weight, May would much rather brag about how he gained it.

It is 15 years later, and May is still 6-foot-2 — but now he’s 265 pounds.

Yeah buddy, it happens to the best of us.

No, not this way it doesn’t. In case you wonder just what type of weight May has gained, go to an area strongman competition sometime. At the most recent one, May picked up a 240-pound car axle — tires still attached, of course — and lifted it above his head about 12 times in one minute.

You see, there’s gaining weight, and then there’s adding weight. The fellows at the Olympic Iron Gym — a self-described hole-in-the-wall beneath the old 23rd Street railroad bridge — add weight.

“As soon as you walk into this place, it makes you want to lift weights,” May said.

May has lifted a lot of them at Olympic. And a few other things too. There are 700-pound excavator tires in front of the gym that members practice flipping. There are heavy kegs they practice tossing. And sometimes there will be a man carrying a steel cage contraption of pipe, angle iron and weights — called a yoke — upon his shoulders up and down adjacent Delaware Street.

As the calendar flips to 2010, this indeed is the time when almost everybody’s making New Year’s resolutions to get in shape.

This is not the place where everybody’s going to do it.

•••

There are several ways to describe Olympic Iron, 520 E. 22nd Terrace. Inside, the place has an odd, shining dinginess to it. The walls are lined with mirrors, which shine like mirrors do. Everything else does not.

“It is like sometimes you have go to the biker bar in town to get the best taco,” said Mike Hocking, who brings his 15-year-old son here to work out. “That’s what this place is like.”

The place could be called technically advanced, if that phrase meant that technically there are a lot of heavy weights here that would advance most men one step closer to a hernia. Lined up near the entrance are about 40 dumbbells. The heaviest one is 150 pounds. That is a point of pride around here. Most gyms don’t have them that heavy.

Yes, it is designed to be lifted with one hand.

The gym also could be labeled as picturesque — meaning, of course, that there are lots of pictures. The tops of the walls are covered with glossy photos of body builders, many of them autographed to the “meatheads at Olympic Iron.”

But co-owner Zach Marrs — a guy with a cue ball head and a cannon ball chest — said the place is best described as an accident. Marrs and his brother Matt are co-owners of Lawrence-based Mil-Spec Security. As part of that business, the brothers expect their employees to have a certain physical “presence.”

Mil-Spec employees back in 2000 were going to a particular Lawrence workout club. Then, they got asked to leave.

“The owner said we were nice guys, but we were so large that we were scaring people,” Zach said.

By 2001, the brothers had set up their own gym in the same building that houses Mil-Spec’s offices. It started out for employees only, but then they opened it up to the public.

Not that it mattered much.

Zach freely admits that the gym loses money. The profits from Mil-Spec keep it open. The gym charges $25 per month, and doesn’t require anybody to sign a contract.

“Our policy is if you don’t want to come back, then don’t,” Matt said. “You’re either going to do this or you’re not.”

There are certainly some who don’t come back, and the brothers said it is not a mystery why. Olympic is an old school gym in a new school world.

“Everything is so much about marketing these days,” Zach said. “It is like Las Vegas. Back in the day, everybody knew what Las Vegas was. Now, it’s Disneyland. This place isn’t Disneyland.”

•••

At age 30, Zach Marrs thought he was done. He could do a squat lift of 450 pounds, and he thought that wasn’t bad for an “old man.” Then he found his second wind.

Ten years later, he squats about 700 pounds.

“I’m 40 years old and still growing,” Marrs said.

And yes, answering the question that he knows is on your mind, he does it naturally.

“It really irritates me when people cheapen everything we do by saying we just juice up,” Marrs said. “I’ve been in the gym religiously since 1984. It doesn’t happen overnight.”

As Lawrence residents step into a gym after stepping off the post-holiday scales, that’s the most common piece of advice the “meatheads” at Olympic have to offer: Be patient and be committed.

“It takes a certain amount of perspective,” said Miguel Rodriguez, who was the 2007 Mr. Missouri. “Or maybe it is just a hard-headedness to lift the same damn weight over and over again. Either way, you have to understand delayed gratification.”

If you stick with it, though, most say more than the muscles will grow.

“What’s really neat about it,” Steve Lowe said of the weightlifting experience, “is that you can make your mind believe that you can do things that other people think aren’t possible. It makes success in everything else easier.

“There really are a lot of life lessons to be learned by moving weight.”

Yeah, but let’s not kid anybody. Watching the muscles grow is fun, too.

When a visitor asked Rodriguez (Mr. Missouri to you) why he keeps coming back, he laughed.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The mirrors, I guess.”