No More Box Jumps

In the last two years, I’ve injured myself three times doing box jumps. Once, I hit my pinky toe on my right foot as I went over and broke it. Once, I missed the jump and fell over, hitting my back on my weight rack. The third time, well, I fell unconscious and I don’t really know what happened. I was starting the jump and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor, my glasses next to me, and blood pouring out of my face.

I think of myself as a strong person, sometimes even as an athlete. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m obviously an athlete because I do many athletic competitions a year, frequently win age group medals, and basically exercise every day of my life. But I don’t always think of myself as an athlete because as a kid, I was extremely uncoordinated, hated P.E. and was always chosen last in any team competition ever. There are reasons for this (see my essays on late-diagnosed autism).

In eighth grade, I began a long process of trying to do better in sports. I asked the P.E. teacher for help in running the mile. I found out that other people could see my body in ways that I could not feel it from the inside. I was clutching my fists tightly, causing pain to my shoulders whenever I ran, and I didn’t feel the pain in my shoulders at all. But sure enough, when I stopped clenching my fists, I found I could run a mile much more easily. In high school, I joined the swim team, and I competed for three years. No one would have called me a successful athlete. The best I ever did was win second place once in the 500 Free, but I made points for the team because I would do whatever race the coach asked me to do, so I became a specialist in the most loathed races: 500 Free, 100 Fly, and 200 Free.

My high school swim coach told me, after I failed at my goal of making it to State my senior year in just one of my events (I was then working out 5 hours a day, morning and afternoon), that I “just hadn’t met a long enough event yet.” I thought he was just being nice and ignored this information. As an Ironman athlete, looking back, it seems rather brilliant. Ironman is not actually my best distance. It’s about twice too long for me. But about 5 hours hits the spot nicely, and there were definitely no events in high school anywhere near that.

For about ten years after I started racing in my thirties, my times kept dropping and dropping. I enjoyed winning, sometimes overall, in local races and watching my national ranking go up year by year. I tried Cross Fit one year, and the focus on weight training resulted in the best year ever of my competition years. (I also hired a coach that year, so maybe it was that).

Fast forward to the last three years since the divorce, where I’ve watched my fitness go in the crapper. Part of it is aging, I’m aware. Part is the ongoing Achilles problem that has made it difficult to run for more than a few minutes at a time. But watching Facebook reels of people doing things that look “cool” to me has been a kind of addiction. I also enjoy watching strong women do Olympic lifts (this is my new porn) like clean and jerks. So I wanted to get my body to be able to do these cool things. Hence my focus on doing box jumps and clean and jerks.

I hired a trainer a year ago who works with me regularly. I will point out (mostly to myself) that my trainer has never, not once, suggested that I try either of these moves. Whenever I mention that I’m trying them on my own, her eyes go up and she does that thing with her voice where she’s trying very hard not to yell at me. “Those moves are considered dangerous by some people,” she says mildly. And then tells me what to do instead, which are normal, non-dangerous things that will actually, you know, improve my muscle strength on a steady basis.

But I still get tempted by my athletic porn and so I ended up with a “mild concussion” that still causes me problems now and then with brief bouts of dizziness and inability to concentrate at work. I also am dealing with a two-month long injury to my right elbow from the clean and jerks. I wasn’t sure what was causing this (maybe it was my crocheting!) until I did some clean and jerks despite the injury and my arm let me know that this was definitely what was causing the pain.

Why do I keep doing things that hurt myself? We could talk about a penchant for enjoying the pain cave that has brought me to doing Ironman in the first place. But I think it’s also a problem of aging. I suspect everyone has an element of this. The 80 year-old man who is climbing his roof because something needs to be done up there and his brain hasn’t yet caught up with the information his body has been telling him about aging. That is me, in a slightly different form. Yes, I want to fight aging. Yes, I want to keep racing. But also, I’m learning to have real talk with myself about what is likely to HELP me do what I want to keep doing and what is likely to NOT HELP me.

Your mileage may vary.