Break It Down To Build It Up

It’s amazing what a year can change about you mentally, emotionally, and physically. We don’t really have a choice in the matter, it’s really just managing our perception of the situations we are placed in. Things never seem to turn out the way we imagined but they always seem to work out.

1 year, 4 months ago

I remember it being an easy-going kind of Wednesday.

I was done with my workout and just playing around with a some stuff I hadn’t done in a while. I was in my 11th week of a 14-week Olympic Lifting program and stronger then I had ever been. Even though I was excelling at the lifting, I was getting board and wanted to get back to CrossFit and see what I could do with all of my new strength.

After just a few wall balls and thrusters, I could tell everything was going to be much easier. While I didn’t have the endurance I had 11 weeks before, the extra strength seemed to make up for a lot of it. I could move a barbell easier, I had far more power, and my technique was better then ever.

After 30 minutes of messing around, I could barley contain myself. My new strength was going to take me to a level I had been searching for as an athlete. All I needed to do was to finish the last 3 weeks of this program, get back to CrossFit shape, and I would finally be able to compete with the bigger, stronger athletes.

It was closer then ever to everything I wanted. It was going to be epic.

14 days later

I decided I might as well try. I had nothing better to do. I laid in bed with my mom, my dad, my little sister, and two nurses standing close by watching. I’m sure at least my mom was holding her breath as I rolled onto my side and slowly started to sit up in my hospital bed for the first time in 3 days.

“Can I put a hand somewhere to help you?” the nurse asked.

“I couldn’t even tell you where it would help.” I said very calmly as I eased myself upright over what seemed like an eternity at a snails pace.

My mom fidgeted as she watched. “Amazing body control.”

I chucked a bit. “Yet I can’t do a backflip.”

Three days before I had broken my neck during gymnastics training. The impact snapped a part of the second vertebra and I became completely paralyzed from the neck down for about 30 seconds. I’ll never forget my first thought as I crumpled to my side after the impact.

“I’m a vegetable now.”

I saw everything that my life would be from that point forward. A bed someone had to change and clean me in; mom reading me a book; having to “eat” everything through a tube; laying in that bed, not being able to move ever again.

In that moment, I understood what terror actually felt like.

In an instant, moving was no longer an option. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to live that life. It would be one thing if I just didn’t have leg, I could deal with that. Having zero control over my body though …

I was lucky. I gained almost full control of my body in a matter of minutes after the accident. A few days later I was taking walks down the hallway, scaring the nurses and physical therapists when I tried to do air squats and lunges.

I spent 80 days in that halo brace, learning how to move from scratch and trying to figure out who this Regina George everyone was talking about was. I used to spend 3 hours a day working out and several more coaching classes. Now I had nothing but time to kill. I had to figure out what it was like to work around this thing, this block that made simple tasks feel like max effort workouts.

Present Day

I’m still fighting physical and psychological issues that developed from the accident and came about during the recovery process. I have very little work capacity and my heart rate goes up just walking up a big flight of stairs, I have a minimum of 15 minutes of physical therapy work to do before I do a workout that used to be just a portion of my warm up, and I’m still missing about 12 pounds of body weight that took me over a year to put on.

Those are honestly about the extent of the issues I am still dealing with physically.

One of my craziest realization during this process was that I I think I actually needed to get hurt. It had to happen so that I could help myself be a better athlete as well as a better coach. I needed to feel what other people were felling so I could understand it all. I’ve always been active so I could never really relate to what starting from scratch was like.

New Lessons

When I came back to Philadelphia, after two weeks of recovering at home in New York, I wasn’t really sure what life was going to be like. My profession is build on teaching people to move and, for the most part, I couldn’t really do that. Would people even want to take direction and help from a guy with a broken neck?

I still remember my first day back to teaching regular classes. We were short one coach and I was asked if I wanted to just direct the more experienced crew or teach the four inexperienced people to Snatch. After a moment of insecurity, I decided to teach the new crew. I wasn’t even sure if I could but I’ve always been an advocate of trial by fire so I decided to give it a go.

Not surprisingly, I fell right back into my teaching zone. I could still explain everything in detail, keep people organized, and I could still make bad jokes and get people to laugh. There were some difficult moments but I just took my time and talked my way through them. The very next class, I taught about 12 people without a moment of hesitation.

A few weeks later at a weightlifting meet, it really sank in that I was still a very capable coach. I was watching some of the lifters on the platform and noticed that a particular style of Split Jerk was actually a compensation for bad technique. At that moment, I realized I was just as much of a coach as I was before.

One of the highlights of recovery was a charity benefit the gym ran for me. It was talked about a lot and a few people said they would come but I wasn’t sure what was actually going to happen. I assumed a few people would show up, we could raise a little money for my doctor bills, and it would be ok. For some reason I wasn’t sure anyone was going to show up. It didn’t seem important enough.

I came to the gym about a half hour before it was to start and there were already over 30 people there. By the end of the day, over 60 people had showed up and over $2,000 was raised. I spent the entire time walking around and talking to people, feeling as close to a “normal” human being as I had since it happened. After I got home that night and let it all sink in, I started to cry from just the sheer overwhelming amount of love everyone showed me.

Throughout the entire process, it was the people around me that kept me going. I’m not sure I could have made it if not for everyone and I owe a lot to all of you.

What’s Ahead?

In addition to improvements made in my personal life, my professional development has gone far beyond what I imagined it would. As I rehabilitated myself, I discovering new techniques to make my body do what it should. Saying I became obsessed with the process is probably an understatement. As I worked on myself, I started to work on other athletes who were having issues and attended a few seminars to fast-track my learning.

Because of this, I’ve recently partnered with Back in Balance Massage Therapy and share offices with them in both Lansdowne and West Chester, Pennsylvania, working as their Injury Recovery and Prevention specialist. I’ve helped dozens of people come back from injury or identify patterns that could lead to serious problems down the road.

While I’m charging ahead in my current endeavors, I have no idea where I’ll be in a year or even 6 months from now. It seems like every few days I’m learning something new that progresses my understanding of the human body, how I interact with the world, or how I run my business.

People ask me all the time if I’ve tried doing gymnastics since my accident. While I haven’t attempted a backflip since, it will happen. There is no way I’m going to let a simple body weight movement get the best of me. For now I’m focusing on making my body move the way it is supposed to and getting everything working in harmony.

That and trying to lift really heavy barbells again.