Benching the stack

Back in high school the standard of being strong was benching the stack.  If I recall correctly the stack was 250 pounds, the largest amount of weight you could put on the bench press machine in the workout room.  There weren't many people who could bench the stack, obviously, and I certainly wasn't one of them.  I would have been able to lift only half of it, I suspect.

Today I am strong enough to bench the stack.  I did my benchpress reps on 180 pounds tonight, and although my machine only goes up to 200 pounds my ratios from earlier on suggest that my maximum press should be 250 now.

It is funny to me how these totally arbitrary standards have such significance.  Why should I care that I passed a benchmark that is twenty years in my past, and didn't even matter back then?

No idea, but I am totally stronger than most of my highschool peers were back when I was 18!  Rawr!

Silly as it is, it feels great to hit that number.  I don't look different than I did six months ago as far as I can tell but my strength has been slowly increasing.  I had thought that I had hit my maximum and plateaued back in the summer when I was doing 160 pound reps so for months I just did the same weights without thinking about it.  Just recently I realized that my reps were easier than before so I pushed my weight up, so it seems that although my gains are drastically slower I am still on the way up.

I have no idea where it will end.  I haven't increased intensity aside from increasing my weights, but I am still seeing small scale results over time.

Now I need a new arbitrary round number to aim for.  The easiest is to just work towards doing my reps on 200 pounds as that is certainly achievable but will take time and effort.  I suppose at some point I should really get into a gym that has a bigger stack on their machine so I can find out if my calculations are right about my maximum weight, because for some reason I want to know.