In the last installment we covered a myriad of lessons, not the least of which was that Swede is not above making really horrendous decisions for himself, not nearly.
When I'm in competition mode, I am a bull, and no one is going to stop me from trying to ram my horns through a matador; no one but me. My indomitable will as an athlete makes me impossible for almost any coach to work with, always has. In recent years (since the events in this story) I've learned to coach myself in the same judicious and logical capacity that I coach my lifters, which has worked out better than letting the bull run loose in the shop, I can tell you for sure.
I, my own adversary, my own coach. I know better than to try and stop the bull, I just direct it, warn it that the sneaky fucking matador is quick with the steel.
Hopefully, by now you realize I'm the kind that feels gravity pulling me off the edge of a building if I stand too close. Something inside of me wants to do the wrong thing, but there is a softer voice, with better advice, in there as well. It's been a challenge, but I've learned to listen to it.
If I am being completely honest, it's never been easy for me to live a normal life. It's like I've got this primal programming. I've always had to fight bestial impulses. While I am a logical and caring person, I have a violent heart, and it wants mayhem sometimes. For the most part, I get what I need of that from my own lifting, but sometimes things can spill over.
There is no place for chaos in my professional life, though. That life is about service. It is a kind of penance: some good for all the wrong I've done. I've been gifted with a pragmatic mind and coaching has allowed me to cultivate that side of my personality, tremendously, as well as develop the strongest relationships I've ever had.
I keep a close watch, but sometimes, when I am the only one at risk, my heart or pride, or both, can get the best of me and that can lead me to make rash decisions. This is especially true when it looks like I am losing. You know, like when I am getting sick before a meet.
If you don't remember, or never read the first installment, go back and read it here, now.
You'll want to do that, or the conclusion to this story isn't going to make a lot of sense.
Back to November, 2013. Here we go.
After the Meet
We all made the six hour trek home, to western PA, on Sunday. I was still pretty sick, and after the bedlam my body had seen, it was ready to rest.
My mind was not ready, though, nor my heart.
I couldn't sleep that night, I was too angry. Pride was fucking with me, asking "you gonna take that shit?" It was waiting when I closed my eyes to taunt me.
Powerlifting is a strange fist fight, where you have to wait multiple months between punches and the iron always wins, eventually. It always wins, because it stays the same. You get old and die between the slow exchange of punches, but the iron is still there, biding it's time.
I've always preferred real fights. You have to keep throwing punches until both parties can agree that someone got their ass beat, and someone got their point across. That's about as simple as it gets. No long term strategy, no long, drawn out, slow satisfaction.
I would have to wait three months to throw the next punch in this fight, at RUM. Once I could dig back into my training, I'd be able to really lock in the numbers I was supposed to hit at the meet I barely survived.
Throughout the next week I worked with my normal roster of clients. I started to notice I was having a really hard time squatting down or bending over to pick up plates and load bars.
The week after a meet is always rough. Every part of my body usually aches for four or five days. You sort of come to expect that. I got pretty fucked up at this meet, so it wasn't really surprising to me that I was more sore than normal.
As the training days passed, I went through the motions and did all of the movements with very low weight for my post meet recovery cycle. Lots of back pain, and some other weird pains, but I kept it moving.
I thought about pushing my chest through and pulling intentionally on deadlift. I couldn't do it in the meet, because my ribs and chest were hamburger. By now the pain in my esophagus was subsiding and my chest didn't hurt anymore. Deadlifting light wasn't bad. Maybe things would move well the following week.
Except that when I walked I couldn't put my right leg forward without getting shooting pain from my back to my hamstring. I knew very well what that could mean, but continued to lie to myself. Just a pinched nerve. I didn't have time for it to be more serious. The siren's song of revenge was calling me to my fate, and it's pull was binding.
The day came that it was time for me to take my first heavy squat. I was ready to start working towards throwing the next blow in this strange fight and my vindictiveness towards the weight was beyond measure. I got to 340 pounds in my warm-ups, and it hurt, which made me angrier.
The weight on the bar was 430 pounds. Sam was cracking the monolift. I set myself up under the bar and braced. As I began to hip the bar out of the rack I was crippled by a knife to the lower back. I fell right back into the rack, just as Sam cracked the mono, luckily before the arms could swing out.
The pain was blinding, but as I regained focus, I could see the look of confusion on my teammate's face.
"What, did you tweak something?"
"I don't fucking know, I thought I got stabbed."
I hadn't been stabbed. Just the same, squats were not in the cards that night, neither was walking or moving much.
In the coming months, chiropractic treatment was a mainstay. I couldn't deadlift at all, and squats were very light rep work only, in an effort to maintain muscle mass.
Bench press, however, was absorbing the brunt of the chaos I had in me.
I was confident that, while it was painful to bench, I was going to at least get some vindication by pressing more at RUM than the 525 which had crushed me in this last meet. I would make it lose to me and then see about rehabbing whatever was going on in my hips and back.
Let's stop for a second here. Do you think I would ever agree to one of my lifters pursuing this course of action? No. The answer is no. This was some dumb shit. Some people need to touch the fire to know it will burn them. I, myself, need to take a sword to the throat before I am willing to slow down and consider my approach to the matador.
Back to the story. Let's fast forward to the meet: RUM 7, Port St. Lucie, Florida.
I wasn't sick. That had been my main concern and largest source of anxiety during my preparation. I'd taken every measure within my control to assure that I would arrive at the meet healthy and free of infection of any kind.
Well I had succeeded in preventing infection, but the rest of my health was still very much in question, especially in regard to my lower back.
I had to do a water cut to make 275, but the water came off effortlessly. It only took a few hours in the shower, so much easier than I was expecting. I decided to push it further and cut to 270, knowing that I could easily be back around 290 by the next day, with a nice bloat. I made weight on Thursday afternoon at exactly 270 and my back was actually not feeling too terribly bad.
Tarra and I went out to eat and I started to rehydrate. I had some regular soda at IHOP, as well as some apple juice. Next I ate about ten pancakes and drank some tomato juice with extra salt added. As we drove I was sipping a water and Gatorade mixture.
Within four hours I was 285 without even using IV fluids. As I rehydrated, the pain in my back and legs returned with a vengeance. I took it easy and laid around to rest, getting up to eat every couple of hours. I drank some soy sauce, ate a couple of ramen soups, pounded more gatorade, ate a little ice cream, and by the time I was ready for bed I was 290 with unbearable back pain.
I couldn't sleep, couldn't find a position where it didn't hurt. When I finally did slip into a blissful dream state, it was short lived. I was rudely awakened by burning pain like fire down my right leg. There would be no more sleep until this meet was in the books.
I didn't lift until the afternoon, so we went and had a huge breakfast at Perkins before heading over to the Port St. Lucie civic center. Everyone in the Perkins, both customer and employee, was a minimum of 75 years old.
Old people are great, but watching them struggle to serve food at half speed is annoying as shit. It was the slowest service I've ever experienced. Florida is overrun with slow driving senior citizens, but it's beautiful and the weather is amazing.
I punished enough food to fill three human beings and then left to go start my warm-ups. That's not something recommend for everyone, but I always like to start the meet with a full stomach if my nerves are good, and they were.
My back was tight so I did a lot of rolling and had Tarra help me do some passive stretching. This had given me some relief in the past, but today it was not doing the trick. Nothing was.
I felt so strong, in spite of the pain. My warm-ups had great speed. My opener, though it was very painful, shot up like an empty bar. I decided to wear Tarra's wrist wraps and, of course, they helped.
I'd opened with the communist equivalent of 485 pounds, in kilos. So I thought I'd add about twenty pounds and, if that moved well, add around twenty more or whatever would make the bar weight greater than 525. Figuring for that last part did not turn out to be a major concern.
My second attempt was 503 point something. As the weight came out of the rack and I drove my feet to stabilize, I was shocked by the same blinding pain I experienced when I thought I'd been stabbed in the back squatting. I was the bull, and seeing red, I lowered the bar and functioned on instinct, pressing fast after the command. I remember hearing the rack command but not the actual racking of the bar. I didn't drop it. Nothing so dramatic this time, just pain like I'd never felt and it didn't lessen when the weight was off me. I had to use the bar to pull myself up on the bench. Humiliating. I got two reds. Later one judge said it was for sinking the bar and the other said it wasn't locked out. These were the least of my concerns. I still had another attempt and I couldn't get off the bench.
Tarra came over and helped me up and walked me back to the warm up area. The ice grill remained intact, but I was in so much pain my eyes were tearing up. I just sat on one of the benches and breathed hard. I tried everything to calm the pain, I was desperate and embarrassed. She asked if I wanted her to stretch me. I couldn't even think straight to realize that might help.
Yes, please stretch me. She didn't move my leg an inch before I jumped to straighten it back down and cried out in agony.
"Do you want me to tell them you're passing on your third?"
"No. I will tell them. Help me up."
I took a handful of ibuprofen and a couple of painkillers, neither of which I like to use.
A tsunami of regret and despair took me. I told them I was passing on my third attempt. I could see my vindication float off in the distance, as a violent undertow pulled me beneath. I died inside and let go of all hope for retribution. There was no fight left. I was beaten. The metal had won, like it always won, by biding its time.
The rest of the day I was a zombie. I posed for pictures and engaged in small talk with other lifters who are friends, but I wasn't there. I was somewhere else in my mind, trying to reconcile what had happened on the platform.
Who was this person? How could I be so weak? Pain was nothing new; I'd been in one kind or another my whole life.
But this pain was different. It took my choice from me. It shut me down.
The rest of the weekend was a loss. I hobbled around with a noticeable limp and every step was excruciating. I handled Dana the following day and Tarra on Sunday. Tarra knew I was hurting bad. I was grateful that I didn't have to hear much about it from her, because she was in competition mode at that point. She was the bull. Her first time at RUM went well that Sunday, and she came back to win Champion of Champions the following year.
That zombie state I was in carried over into the days and weeks after I returned home. I couldn't get my bearings on life. I was lost at sea.
I would oscillate between resigned and enraged. I couldn't look at myself. I had to work, so work I did. Until one morning, a few weeks after my return, I handed out the bar for one of my clients' bench press. It was maybe 130 pounds.
As I lifted up and out, I felt something shift in my lower back and I almost dropped the bar into her hands. Luckily, she was able to rack it herself when she finished, because I could not help her. I limped out of the room in agony and took a handful of ibuprofen for the first time since the meet.
I called a good friend who is a chiropractor. He told me to ice it and try to come in for treatment. I drank a bunch of water, set my alarm for one hour and slept on some ice. This did not do the trick.
It hurt really bad but I knew it wasn't going to fix itself. If felt like there was acid burning away the flesh in my lower back and glute. Pain was a constant "8."
I waited an hour and it go not better so I knew I was going to have to man up and make it out to the truck to drive over and get an adjustment and hopefully some relief. I hung my legs off the bed and forced myself up into a seated position. I gathered my resolve and pushed on my knees to help myself stand.
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The moment the weight of my upper body loaded on to my spine as I stood, I was hammered with a blinding pain and I lost consciousness. The horrible burning was twice as bad as before and, along with the sound of my own screaming, it woke me back up, hanging off the bed where I'd fallen. At this point, pain was a solid "10." My stomach started tensing from the pain and I vomited in the bed a little bit. The muscles contracting from vomiting made the pain unreal. If you've ever thought you were around a ten on the pain scale and you didn't vomit or pass out, you were probably a little off in your estimate of how bad shit can get.
I texted an incoherent message to both my father and Tarra. Just frantic letters that didn't understand how to form words. My dad happened to be in the gym and after seeing the state I was in, he called 911.
They ambulance arrived quickly. I was focused on breathing shallow breaths so I didn't move too much. They determined I needed to be taken out on a stretcher, but they had find a way to get me on to it.
One of the EMT's was a brunette female, maybe twenty years old. Very plain looking and way too serious about being in charge. She was pretty rude right from jump.
At one point she made a snide comment about me lifting, like I wasn't there. Then she actually said to me at one point that this was probably going to be a problem for the rest of my life and I wouldn't be able to lift anymore. I wanted to brow beat her into submission, but I could even take deep breaths. All I could muster was "thanks for your opinion, doc." It was almost inconceivable that I could be in the state I was in, and getting trolled by some idiot who isn't even old enough to buy beer yet.
Fortunately a different EMT was the one to load me in an ambulance and ride to the hospital with me. She was kind and comforting. My blood pressure was insane, but she said that was normal given the circumstances and that it would probably go down once they had me doped out of my mind.
The next five hours were spent in the emergency room. Those were the worst, most torturous hours I have ever experienced. I tried to refuse the drugs. This confused the nurse, who must've thought I was actually there to score the drugs.
She talked to me for awhile, kind of seduced me with the idea that the drugs would get me through.
She reminded me that I was about to get an MRI. It was too much. I took everything they would give me before I let them squeeze me into that machine. The drugs brought the pain from a ten to an eight, as long as I didn't move at all or breathe in too deeply.
After that whole ordeal, once the MRI results came back, I was visited by the attending physician, who explained that I wasn't going anywhere without spinal surgery, and that the next step was to get me a room and meet with a neurosurgeon.
Well, I was not expecting to leave, honestly, but to hear it confirmed that I needed to have surgery performed on my spine sent me reeling. It's not like I had time to digest this information, either. It had to be done now. All I could picture were worst case scenarios. All was lost.
More grimness and foreboding, and more to come.
The conclusion in the next installment.
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