The way back: surgery, fifteen years, and sixty kilos

About a year before it happened, I woke up two or three times with a strange pain in my neck, radiating down into my left arm.

By the middle of the day it was gone. So I did nothing. I kept going to the gym, I kept training normally, and I did not give it another thought.

I want to sit on that for a moment, because if you take one practical thing from this article, take this one.

Then one morning I woke up with the same pain, and this time it did not leave.

I drove to work — a hundred kilometres each way, in those days. The pain did not ease on the journey, and I could not find a position behind the wheel that helped. At work it got worse. Not unbearable yet, but constant, insistent, impossible to ignore. I signed myself out and drove home.

On the way back I had to drive with my head tilted to one side the whole way. Straightening my neck hurt so much that I could barely steer.

The next morning it was worse again. That was when I understood that something was genuinely wrong.

I have had toothache. I have had the ordinary injuries a man collects. Nothing in my life prepared me for this.

It became the strongest pain I have ever experienced. I could not function. I could not sleep.

I would wake in the middle of the night and simply not know what to do with myself. There was no position that helped. I would get up and go and sit in the kitchen, half sitting, half lying, in the dark.

I am putting that in writing because men in their forties do not tend to say it, and someone reading this page may be sitting in their own kitchen tonight.

I went to a GP. I got painkillers and a sick note for a week or two.

The painkillers did nothing. Not "took the edge off". Nothing.

So it was one doctor, then another, then another. And eventually I stopped waiting.

I arranged an MRI scan myself, off my own back. Nobody handed it to me. I went and got it done privately, because I had run out of patience with a process that was going nowhere.

The scan showed exactly what was happening. I took it to a neurosurgeon, who looked at it and told me straight away that surgery was necessary.

If your gut is telling you something is badly wrong and the system is handing you paracetamol, push. Get the imaging. Get in front of someone who can actually read it.

Afterwards was strange. I could barely move. I was in an orthopaedic collar. I walked stiffly, like something mechanical, and it still hurt.

There was no rehabilitation programme. There was no physiotherapist. There was, in effect, nothing except time.

Between the months of sick leave before the operation and the recovery afterwards, I was away from work for close to six months.

What I was told, in total, amounted to this:

• The implant reduces the rotation of my head by a few degrees.
• For roughly the first six months, do not lift more than five kilograms.
• After that, gradually return to normal life.

That was it. That was the whole of the guidance I received about how to live in the body I now had.

At three months I changed jobs. There was no possibility of driving a hundred kilometres each way any more. I found something closer.

The first weeks were brutal, and not because of my neck. I had done no physical effort of any kind for six months. I was simply not conditioned for work any more. I came home destroyed every single day.

And then, quietly, fifteen years went past.

I want to be accurate about why, because the obvious answer is wrong.

It was not fear. I was not sitting at home terrified that my neck would snap. I was not avoiding the gym because a doctor had warned me off — no doctor had said anything at all, in either direction.

It was just life. Work. A marriage. Circumstances that made a gym membership something that never quite happened, year after year, until fifteen of them had gone.

That is how it goes, I think, for most men who stop. Not one dramatic decision. Just a series of years in which it did not happen.

Two things, and I am going to be honest about both.

Looking at myself

I looked at my body and saw that I was going backwards. I had been strong once. Now I was not. I could see the muscle gone, the strength gone, and I missed it in a way that was becoming hard to sit with.

The divorce

The direct trigger was the end of my marriage.

I had wanted to train for a long time before that. The circumstances of my life at the time did not allow it. When the marriage ended, that changed — and two things happened at once.

The first was that I finally could go. The second was that I badly needed somewhere to put myself.

I am not going to over-claim here. Training is not therapy and I would not tell anyone in real trouble that a squat rack is a substitute for proper help. But at that moment, having somewhere to go, something to do, and something that got measurably better every few weeks — that held me together.

If you are coming out of something and looking for a reason to start, that is a good enough reason. It is the one that worked for me.

The first session back, I did what any man who used to lift does. I went straight to the bench.

I do not remember the exact number. It was around sixty kilos, maybe a little more, for a few reps.

Here is what makes that number land properly. In the old days, I used to warm up with a hundred.

Now a hundred was unthinkable and sixty was the session.

I walked out of that gym feeling two completely opposite things at the same time. Genuinely pleased that I had gone at all, that I had actually done it, that after fifteen years I was back under a bar. And, at the same time, quietly gutted. Because the weight was so small, and I remembered exactly what these arms used to do.

Two years later I bench 100 for six, and 110 for two. From sixty. That is what two years of turning up does.

People assume I must train in fear. That every rep I am waiting for something in my neck to give way.

I do not, and I am telling you the truth about this. I have essentially forgotten the implant is there. Occasionally I remember that I have it. In ordinary life I do not think about it at all.

I feel nothing in my neck. It does not hurt, it does not ache, it does not limit me. The few degrees of rotation I supposedly lost, I have never once noticed — I would have to crank my head to its absolute limit to find them, and I never did that anyway.

This is the part where I have to be hardest on myself.

How did I decide that a barbell across my back was out, but a leg press was fine? That dumbbells were acceptable but a barbell bench was not?

Instinct. That is the honest answer. Pure instinct.

I reasoned it out for myself: a machine isolates the load. It puts the work into the muscle it is supposed to work, and it does not load my spine along the way. A free barbell across my shoulders does the opposite. It seemed obvious, so I went with it.

And it worked. Two years in, nothing has gone wrong.

But I want to be extremely clear with you about what that is:

Two years ago I stood outside a commercial gym, forty-something years old, fifteen years out of practice, with a piece of metal in my neck, about to find out how much of me was left.

If I could say one thing to that man, it would be one word.

Just go. It will be sixty kilos and it will hurt your pride, and it will be the best decision you make this decade.

Because the version of me that stood outside that door had already lost fifteen years to waiting. Not to injury — the injury cost six months. To waiting. To circumstances. To the years quietly going by.

Whatever is left of your body, it is still worth training. Sixty kilos is not a humiliation. It is a starting point, and starting points only look small in hindsight, once you are standing well past them.