Training for Life – Confessions of a Recovering Personal Trainer

The Kindle edition of my book, Training for Life – Confessions of a Recovering Personal Trainer, is now available (also available in paperback.   Here’s an excerpt:

As usual I had begun my countdown upstairs, anticipating the traffic I would have to sit in on the Grand Central Parkway. My body was jonesing for a workout fix, something to calm my nerves down. At one time I had been the worker who stayed late working into the night. No traffic on the Grand Central after 7PM.

The radio was going on about heavy traffic, so I decided to use the side streets through Hillcrest. “Take it slow.” The words repeated in my mind. These streets so close to schools and houses of worship were always crawling with police, and I had gotten my share of tickets. I could not afford anymore, especially if I wanted to avoid mass transit as a means of travel.

Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear the Reaper was coming from the radio and gave me the bravado to take a shortcut around Utopia Parkway and cut up 137^th Street; an interesting decision on this extremely narrow road that opened into a two way street past a house of worship. I decided to slow down.

“Don’t Fear the Reaper…” What an amazing guitar solo, I thought. Driving at 30 miles an hour, I thought I was hallucinating. Out of the corner of my right eye, an optical illusion was getting bigger, approaching at a pretty fast clip.

My head bounced off the driver side window. With my ears ringing, I heard the crunch of metal on metal, as the front of a Toyota Camry bent my car in half. With my head still fuzzy, I remember hearing screaming, but in foggy, distant voices, as the car continued to move sideways up and over the curb, pushing my car towards a group of children walking home from school. Even in my haze, I felt the nausea and fear that happens when something really bad is about to occur. I turned the wheel all the way left, the car teetering on its side, and somehow avoided the kids.

I awoke briefly in the ambulance taking me to a hospital that used to be called Booth Memorial, where I was born. “If she had hit him from the driver’s side,” I heard one paramedic say to the other, “he’d be toe tagged now.”

“Yeah, lucky SOB.”

Then black again.

I awoke to a pen light being shone in my eyes. Apparently all emergency room doctors carry pen lights. My head had taken quite a shot, and I was concussed. My L5 in the lower back was like that gum you chew and the juice pops out into your mouth. I was oozing.

Fully awake now and feeling groggy and nauseous, it dawned on me that I had missed my workout. I had become so addicted to working out, it was the first thing I pondered while waking.

The woman who hit my car was a 96-year-old holocaust survivor, who was somehow still allowed to drive. She told the police that she had never seen the stop sign. Given her cataracts, that was probably no lie. She never once pumped the brakes. The only breaking going on was my car in half and my body in pain. You would think that it would have been a lesson to me to never leave work early.

After my stay in the hospital, I was sent to a neurologist, had MRI’s taken of my back and neck and was sent to a pain management group on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills. The only thing pain management managed was to turn me into an addict.

I went twice a week, and the doctor did a superficial once over, I mean full body exam. I counted to ten for him and told him my name. Then I was sent down the hall for some physical therapy work, which consisted mostly of electric stimulation for 30 minutes. When I left, I got my lollipop and a script for happy pills.

At first the pills made me feel relaxed and pain free, but soon I noticed that I couldn’t stop thinking about my little happy pills. I couldn’t do without my new friends. I went back for more as often as I could.

It wasn’t long before I started paying street prices for many types of pain killers, not just Percocet, the worst being OxyContin. At first I felt that the pills were helping me get through tough workouts and stressful life situations, but the truth is that I had started to withdraw into a shell. ”