So we join health clubs, buy home gyms, make buckets of money for those morons who stick two aluminum poles together, rivet a braided steel cable to it and call it “the greatest weight loss machine eva.” To what end? Lighter bank accounts and larger bellies. But sometimes a person will hit upon something that works, something they can both feel the passion for and actually manage to get fit, stay fit and be stronger. When passion exceeds logic, you get damage.

Such was the case with martial arts. I had met someone smart, beautiful, strong and independent. She was her own person and I loved that about her. She didn’t do the usual softball games after work (I’d met her when I myself was on an after work indoor soccer team). Having recently gone through a time where the carpet, or more aptly the world, was yanked out from underneath me resulting in my landing very hard on my head, I was feeling like I wasn’t all that up for being in crowds either, nor following, so different was good and different was what we did.

And it worked. Through martial arts, we found something we could get excited about. But after a time, with anything involving humans, there is at least one person who wants more power than they can get and politics started rearing an ugly head in the school. As we saw the life begin to drain out of our passion, we knew it was time to depart.

After a few years, we gave it another shot. It was Tae Kwon Do as before and it was better, it was doing for us what we needed it to do. But, alas, despite a consuming passion for the martial arts and a commitment and dedication to the school, the politics and internal bickering amongst the leaders and the small skirmishes for power amongst the high ranks finally took a toll as well. It became like that relationship in college you cling to over the summer, hanging on to it because it’s all you’ve got. Then someone shows you the pipe dream you’re living, and the poor treatment you’re enduring. The bubble bursts leaving behind nothing but the air it held which is quick carried away on the wind. It was goodbye again but what had revealed the pipe dream was something altogether different. The same world, but vastly different environment of Kung Fu.

Kung Fu is a hard, exhausting art. It was one of the best ways we had found to move our bodies, make them do what we needed and get the benefit of becoming much stronger and much more healthy. Mentally and physically it changed us and made us better people. We gave as much passion to it as anything we’d ever done. But if you’re passionate about something long enough, sometimes you miss the signs that you’re getting in too deep. Miss those and there will be damage.

It was an honor being asked to begin training in Iron Palm. It became every day, day in and day out, for what turned out, in that fisrt part, to be 6 months. Grueling, mind numbing training that was both physical but also mental. There were deprivations in order to keep my chi full and clear. Training exercises to build more chi, chi gong meditations for building even more. I had all that chi and no place to put it.

Anything that requires the striking of a body part against an unforgiving surface, requires that skin and bone be conditioned to take the impact. Done properly it neither hurts nor causes any damage. But there is change, or what some might consider damage. Because the skin thickens and there are micro fractures in the bone that make bone more dense when they heal, filling in any holes that could make it weak during high velocity strikes.

After months of thousands of full force strikes against a leather pillow filled with copper BBs, after enduring the mental anguish of wanting that which I needed to deprive myself of in order to reach that level of mental strength, I broke two cement landscaping cap stones with each of my bare hands. The accompanying rush was astounding.

When you jump out of an airplane, take a class 5 rapids in a kayak, or maybe take a sport bike around a turn and actually touch your knee puck to the pavement, the rush of adrenaline is, by all accounts, like nothing else. I can say that the rush of adrenaline one feels after snapping two inches of concrete with a body part probably comes pretty close. And the buzz lasts for a couple of hours.

But that buzz is dangerous. Like anything else that makes a person feel more alive than they had before, they sometimes want more. They go further for it. They demand more of themselves before they are ready or have done enough mental preparation in order to ensure they will do what they endeavor. It was in that zone when I was doing a more difficult break with a right knife edge. I wanted so badly to make it I lost my edge. At the moment of impact, my wrist came down on the edge of the stone between the knobby wrist bone and the fleshy part of the edge of my palm. The blocks broke, but I would never break with that hand again.

Toward the end of my breaking “career” I was too driven, holding on too tight and not paying attention to what my body was telling me. The liniment I used for conditioning was drying out my skin. It was starting to crack and with the thousands of training hits I was doing each week, the crack grew. Finally, having paid it no mind, I ended up with a hole in my left wrist a quarter inch deep. It hurt a lot and bled each time I trained. What was this insanity? Just what exactly was I trying to prove? It may have been at that point I realized it was too much. There was too much going on for me to be focused enough to control my desire to excel. And I realized I was cutting corners to get to that buzz quicker, see the crumbled concrete between the cinder block stand. One last break, three blocks this time and it was over. I watched the video over and over, seeing the less than perfect form, seeing that it was more brute force than the finesse and focus it should have been. The bricks broke, it didn’t hurt and the roar of the audience sucked me into that vortex of adrenaline just the same, but that wasn’t what it was all about. It had to be about me, the chi, the focus, the art. But that was slipping.

And in the end, as I stepped back further from what had become my obsession, I saw another result of my practice in Iron Palm. The last two fingers on my left hand were starting to spontaneously go numb. Depending on how I slept, I would wake up and the outsides of my hands would be numb and cool. This couldn’t be right and doubt had me wondering if I had done something wrong in training or the training itself was not as benign as I had originally thought. I was at the end, and it became easier and easier to walk away. I realized that damage was done. And while it was a beautiful thing while I was in it, I had turned away knowing I couldn’t go back. It might have been that I was not mentally as strong as I had hoped. Or maybe I was fooling myself into thinking I was doing everything I needed to do properly, not cutting any corners. Like the rider who’s dragged his knee puck but nearly high sided and gone off a cliff, I was glad to have done it, but I wouldn’t be doing it again.

A little more than a decade after the mountain shook me loose and a decade before my hands went partially numb (what?…later), I worked at a sports supplement company. It was the company in the industry at the time and known as the gold standard of product lines that could pump you up, boost your athletic abilities, make you stronger, make you more powerful, smarter and better looking Well, ok, maybe not those last two but a lot of people thought that; and there were a lot of pretty good looking people milling around. I wasn’t one of them but they were there. It was the closest thing to a cult I had ever been exposed to and you could find plenty of people drinking the cool-aide in the building. As far as cults go the company had quite a distance to go before dying a fiery death as the sheriffs bare down on them with armored personnel carriers, but there were most definitely some pretty rabid fans and employees. There were people who would actually travel to the building from all over the country just to have their picture taken in front of the sign out front. The sign. Really! “I seen ‘em do it!”

The result of this popularity was a cash flow that was like drinking from a fire hose, and one (of many) results of that was a state of the art gym with everything you’d need to achieve one or all of the above physical improvements. It was not a big leap to understand that if you got enough testosterone in that gym, grunts, shouts, screams and the gnashing of teeth would soon follow as the volume of Sports Center got turned up and the heat was on to “go big or go home”. Sheesh, it was a little much sometimes. When the CEO is a well known body builder, that just kinda goes with the deal, I guess.

It was usually the case in the mornings when my friend, Jeff, and I would go for our morning workout. He’d spot me, I’d spot him and it all worked out pretty well. The big boys around us would be doing their thing, busting out the reps with three 45s on each side…call me a sissy, but I was never going to get there and I could live with that. I got to looking like that silly fellow in his underwear at the top of the page (very silly!! But you should have seen the before…eeek…that wasn’t silly, that was just scary.) Feeling fit is a good thing. Being fit is even better. I was not as satisfied as I would have liked back then, but, of course, at that time being as satisfied as I wanted to be would have required dabbling in nutrients of an injectable nature which, thankfully, I did not pursue. Ah, to be relatively young, still mostly bullet proof and thinking stupid thoughts.

Then things kinda went sideways.

I don’t know if it was the heavy weight, improper form or just physiology, but my left shoulder started to go. First, it was just sore, then it grew to be really sore, and then it was painful enough to prevent any kind of heavy lifting or really much of anything day to day with the exception of typing software code. That was OK (as least I could keep my job), but the residual effect was being unable to lift my arm above head height and every once in a while finding an ice pick had been driven into it from the top.

So now, 10 years later and with much learning having been gained, I lament the beatings Jeff and I used to visit upon our bodies. The dips that went too far down so we could get that “extra burn”, the one last rep of the military press beyond what we were really capable of and all the other things I did to make sure the most flexible joint in my body remained out of balance and pain remained just on the other side of the door marked “just one more”.

The net result of that and all my exploits using my arms- like way back in the days in Alexandria, Virginia, I remember wanting to get that softball to home plate from the outfield. Not just get it there, but get it straight there, no bounce. That was an exercise in checking how far my left shoulder joint would go before it popped out. And it hurt like hell!- and every once in a while my shoulder will turn to me and make sure I understand that I am not the boss of it and if there is any question, there might need to be a reinforcement class next time I decide I want to lift an eight by eight pressure treated timber on to it.

We are never really in complete control, are we?

So you go out and drink a lot, eat very spicy food as much as you want, play any sport that strikes your fancy and generally do things that tend to put you on your backside every so often. But back then, you could dust yourself off and go chase down the mutt who knocked you flat for a little payback. All in good fun and sport. There are few second thoughts about what effects these things might have on you later. Whether consciously or not you believe your physical endeavors aren’t supposed to have an effect because the human body has an incredible capacity to heal itself, right? Besides, up to that point, for most of us, there’s no evidence that healing wouldn’t happen. So you continue, and when you hit 40, your the mutt and your body is the one coming for payback.

I submit the following for your consideration.

I went skiing for the first time as a sophomore in college; went to upstate New York with my roommate and another friend to some ski resort that was more of a bump than a mountain (my inner Colorado snob coming out, having been spoiled by our ever-present, vast and towering peaks.) I had never skied, and never really thought about it until my buddies brought it up that day. Prior to that, I had only watched a TV show for 10 minutes on how to ski. It was one I had just happened upon when surfing the channels during a moment of college boredom (as much as one could surf back then).

So we went, and I had been doing well all afternoon, but on one particular run, I came around a right turn way too hot. My friends were waiting about half way down that segment of the hill and saw me blur around the corner three times faster than than was probably prudent. Immediately they called for me to slow down, so I eased my skis sideways, doing that parallel edging thing, whatever you call that (still green after all these years), and started digging into the slope.

But we were in the East. The slope was not 153 inches of packed powder. It was 3 inches of packed powder on top of 10 inches of solid ice. In some areas, those 3 inches had been scraped away by fools who take right turns way too hot and as I began to slow, I hit some ice where I may have actually sped up a bit. Then, once again, I was back into the snow pack and that’s when this mountain-lette decided to shake itself free of yet another moron.

Hitting that second section of snow after the ice sheet was like riding a bike on road and then heading up onto the grass, or maybe more like heading onto the beach…but at 30 miles per hour. You kinda have a tendency to slow down. But even better, it was what you’d call a high-side.

When I was riding motorcycles I’d sometimes “drag a knee” when I was on the sport bikes (not touching down of course lest there be Damage in the form of leaving my patella behind half way through the turn) and drag the kick stand when I was on the cruisers. Thought I was cool. But that’s another Damage story. Thinking you’re cool is usually the start on the path to Damage.

In taking turns this tight, there was always that risk of high-siding. (putting on a pseudo scientific affect) This occurs when the angular momentum of the turn/curve is replaced by tangential motion along the direction of travel (centrifugal force no longer having an effect) out of the arc, in a straight line, no more curve. It’s a physics thing. The bike stops dead in its tracks for a brief moment and you don’t. Then suddenly you are the participant in a demonstration of rotational inertia. You go sailing out of the arc of the curve and if you’re lucky, leave the bike to do its own thing hoping it won’t fly up and come down on top of you (an riding instructor once told me he saw an accident in which an eight hundred pound Goldwing flew 150 feet after a high-side). Think of a string with a ball on the end. You’re the ball, where the tires meet the road is the string in your hand. How much faster is the ball going than the part that’s closer to your hand…get the idea? But as sixty miles per hour, gravity tends to mean less and, thus, the flying part.

This is sort of what came next in my attempt to stop using ice and then making a transition to something fairly less slick. When I hit the softer snow, I was slowed suddenly enough that I high-sided and launched myself, or more aptly “was launched,” into the air – I am under no illusions that I was actually in control. With the angle of the mountain, my speed and my downhill direction of travel, I possibly flew 40 feet over the ground. There was that sudden silent, frictionless and vibration-free sensation of no longer being in contact with the ground. In the end, as they say in aviation, take off is optional but landing is mandatory.

In skiing you have the “yard sale” where everything not nailed to your body comes off and ends up somewhere within a 10 foot radius of the twisted wreckage you’ve become. With a sudden thump and the scrapping sound of snow, I executed my yard sale in fine style and then there was nothing. Silence. I just lay there taking an inventory of myself to make sure first, that everything was still attached and, second, to make sure the attachments fit and weren’t broken. They did and they weren’t but my left knee was pretty banged up (how I didn’t tear my ACL is still a mystery to me.) And that leads me to my point.

That one ski outing by a young bullet proof college student was possibly the start of what has evolved into a regular routine of icing down my knees after working out. But you couldn’t have told me then that I’d pay for not treating my joints a little more nicely. You learn from your mistakes, but sometimes the lessons come when you already know the material, or it’s too late to act on the sage advice.