The Narrow Straits

Last summer I was doing pull-ups at the gym of where I used to work, when I felt a sudden pain surface somewhere between the left side of my scapula and the spine. At the time, I brushed it off as yet another reminder of why I should probably take stretching more seriously. As the weeks went by, I began to notice that its intensity started to become even more nagging, and realized that I must have really done a number on it. I enlisted my friend and training partner, Blaine, to begin to use all manner of modern, battery-powered Medievalesque instruments to stab, loosen, and wrench what we both assumed was a severely tight muscle. As is often the case when it comes to torn or strained muscles, it is another group which is in fact the culprit—the site in question is typically the victim. But after a month of doing all manner of stretches as well as enlisting the stubborn help of lacrosse ball, none of my labors seemed to lessen the pain. Even after all of the years of lifting, I still find my own anatomy as a kind of mystery, a terra incognita to the mental part of my existence.

One day, while sitting in mass, I found my pain so excruciating that I had to get up towards the middle of it and drive home to lay on my bed, being unable to even sit without the left side of my upper back feeling as though there was an iron rod piercing it. Reluctantly, I went to an orthopedic, who had ordered some x-rays of my shoulder to find that it was not in fact my shoulder, but that the disks in my cervical spine were beginning to lose their integrity, and that bone spurs had begun to develop, pinching the nerve which runs down from my neck through to my left arm. Shocked, I began to rifle through the catalogue of all of the ill-advised lifts I had done over the past few years: Zercher squats with freshly-cut trees, high-bar back squats which at times felt as though they were placed closer to my neck than resting along my traps, and then finally, my stint in the fire academy, where for months a heavy pack was positioned on my back for a good third of my day. The doctor, however, didn’t seem to indicate that any of this was trauma-induced. “You have the neck of someone in their 70s” he said, which irritated me. “It could be genetics, bad posture, we don’t know.”

Roughly a year later, the cause is still up for debate. Regardless, it put a damper on my workouts. I was told to stop working out, and I dutifully obliged. I was told that I could either have surgery, which would basically fuse part of my c-spine, thus limiting the mobility of my neck, or continue to have a round of two or cortisone injections. I opted for the latter, and after a month or so, the pain began to subside. But I noticed that in the five or so months of not working out, the pain reemerged, and, starting to become irascible from not lifting, I decided to go back to the gym. And within a few weeks, the pain decreased even more.

I speak for perhaps most lifters when I say that lifting is both cause and the cure for most of what ails the body. In my case, lifting most likely exacerbated the injury. The human body, while certainly designed to express our muscular endowment from our ancestors, also seems to not enjoy being under a near constant regime of stress. Once we do force it upon ourselves to get stronger and more fit, we become obliged—committed, really—to then approach that level of exertion, lest we begin to see our gains recede and the cells shrink from misuse. Lifting is a fickle game. One that earlier on in my fitness journey, I realized doesn’t have an end. It is repetitious, exhausting, and by its nature, misunderstood. The body has no instructions, it remains non-verbal.

In discovering the body, however, I found myself remarking on just how wonderful getting stronger has been. Apart from the aesthetic appeal, or even the enhanced functionality of moving through space, there is a recognition that some of the narrowest parts of the anatomy are at the same time, the most important conduits of being sentient. Apart from my neck—which admittedly I am now more cognizant of training—I’ve noticed that another anatomical isthmus is my wrist. Second to the neck, it is the most fascinating, if not paradoxical part I’ve grown to appreciate, especially whenever I deadlift.

It’s comprised of eight bones which attach to an additional set of twenty-seven bones of the hand and opposite of that, the rest of the body’s one hundred and seventy-one. I can remember the first time injuring my wrist while catching a clean, the sour note they played as they bent backwards, hyperextended, inches away from my shoulders. A sense of dread came over me when I realized I wasn’t able to put weight on them in quite the same way.

The wrist controls the very function of writing, of gesticulating, assistance in eating, of manipulating a phone, gripping a garbage bag or a coffee mug; it helps push away unwanted advances as much as it embraces wanted ones. A powerlifter once told me that a weak wrist is a gateway to having a weak body, and vice-versa. And so, as a joint, the wrist is capable of holding hundreds of pounds of weight in a relatively small part of the body. It is the first thing I can’t feel in the morning when I’ve slept on my arm all night. My wrist is arguably the most underappreciated, overused joint I have come to know in my life as a writer and as a lifter.