A Hard Conversation, Thinly Veiled as a Story about my Injured Back

How I'm healing from a busted back and other much more serious damage. (Trigger warning: SA)

I was 22 years old when I was raped in my gym by a personal trainer.

He wasn’t my personal trainer. I couldn’t—and still can’t—afford one of those, even with the pitiful settlement check I collected around the time I turned 24. The gym staff (all men) and their corporate overlords (all men) lied and bullied and treated me like shit; legally, I think that’s all I can say. 

I’m not here for pity, though, or even to wax poetic about surviving or whatever the hell I’ve been doing these last five years, but I’m not dense enough to think I can mention my assault without reassuring you of this: I am okay. It’s no small task to separate the battle from the battlefield, so my relationship with the gym remains complicated, but better than you might expect for someone whose body was broken into while she was trying to build it stronger.

If you’re truly curious, carve out a few hours and brew me a pot of coffee. I’ll tell you all about the therapy, the anger, the time I spat on the gym manager’s floor when he told me they still wouldn’t pay to install security cameras. What’s the cost of a ruined life? 

But let’s set it aside for now, and let’s talk about how I hurt my back. 

I’ve hurt it a few times, actually. Once when I was 23, in the throes of a lawsuit and with piss-poor deadlift form. Once when I failed at a squat PR. Both times, I was out of the gym for at least a week. Injuring your back is the first step towards questioning your entire life, wondering why you took little things like tying your shoes or picking up dog shit for granted. All the serious injuries I’ve sustained have been back injuries, if you don’t count my bum knee, which is less of an injury and more of an evergreen nuisance. 

I’ve injured myself lifting weights, but I lift weights to avoid injuries. The paradox of fitness, I suppose. My joints are only getting worse from here forward, and with several bucket list hikes remaining and at least one more cross-country move ahead, I need this body to last me until an evil tech entrepreneur can 3D print me a new one. So I go to the gym a lot, and not just to rot on the elliptical or do Big Booty Judy Instagram workouts. I train often and deliberately toward the reward of a long, fulfilling life, balancing the risk factors within my control. 

I’m a weightlifting hobbyist, so I’ll only speak for my own body, but the biggest indicator of injury for me isn’t what I eat or how I sleep or whether or not I warm up; it’s stress. Like a camel storing water in its hump, I have enough stress built up in my lumbar region to survive several months in the desert. On the day to day, I operate at maximum capacity, balancing the endless logistics of my nomadic lifestyle with running my writing agency, fulfilling my content creator contracts, and trying to keep a home. Most days, the only way I keep from caving in on myself is by moving my body, but tack on a bit of bad news about a lawsuit or a fight with a friend and my body is too tense and distracted to focus on form. I’m trying to be more aware of this. 

My workout routine is ever-evolving and often dependent on where I’m living. My LA apartment complex had its own fitness center with a squat rack, and I briefly became an Orangetheory girlie in Seattle and Chicago, mainly because there was one nearby. I liked the accountability that came with having a class membership, and for the better part of a year, I steadily fell out of love with weightlifting, embracing the transition into my cardio era. And then, in Boulder, I found Uplift, a strength training gym with a nice balance of classes and a lineup of impressive coaches, mostly women. After an eight or nine month break in my relationship with the barbell, she and I picked up right where we left off, give or take a few plates. 

Uplift quickly proved itself to be less of a gym and more of a home base. I’ve been weightlifting solo for years, but the solidarity of loading up a barbell alongside my classmates was new and compelling. I found myself waking up early for workouts or sticking around after class to chat with the coaches. For obvious reasons, I’d avoided fitness classes led by men for years, but when I accidentally signed up for a class with Coach Devin, I was pleased to discover he was about as intimidating as a muscular Buddy the Elf. With Devin’s cues, I pulled more weight on my deadlift in his class than I had in eight years of training. 

And then, another back injury. 

It was a Monday in late March, and without too many details, my family was a caravan of camels in the midst of an emergency, each of us storing more stress than our lower backs could hold. I went to class at Uplift to take the stress out on the barbell as usual, but even in the warmup, I could feel something was off. Foolishly, I ignored it. Then the first lift—a snatch grip deadlift—knocked my ass right onto the squishy gym floor. 

Jena, who was coaching our class, hurried to my side with all the calm concern you’d hope for. She asked me where the pain was, and I rolled onto my knees, folding one arm behind my back to feel for the exact spot. Lower left. She disappeared for a moment, returning with a foam roller and a weight bench. “Prop your legs up,” she said, tapping the bench, “and squeeze this foam roller between your thighs as hard as you can.” 

While the rest of the class went on loading plates onto their bars, I lay there, squeezing, waiting for the pain to ease up. Jena did a lap, offered a few form corrections to my classmates, then circled back to me. “I’ve dealt with back stuff before,” she commiserated. “It’s not fun.” I nodded in agreement at her diagnosis. I definitely wasn’t having fun. 

After I’d had enough of the foam roller, she guided me into another movement, then another. I leaned into shin boxes and shimmied my feet beneath my butt for hip bridges, neither of which I would’ve considered to be helpful in healing my lower back, but they were. “How’s that feeling?” she asked between each new effort. It all felt good. The pain wasn’t going away, but it was certainly getting duller. 

“The reason your back tightens up like that,” Jena explained, “is because your body doesn’t feel safe. So we just need to keep reminding it: you’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe.” 

My breath smoothed me flat to the gym floor like a sticker. She had no idea just how right she was. 

Class wrapped up, and I finished my circuit of stretches before peeling myself off the floor to remember which cubby I shoved my coat in. Before I made it out the door, Jena stopped me to talk through a prescription of activities for my evening. Maybe some gentle yoga or a long walk, but I was to resist the urge to just lie down. We had to keep it moving if my back was going to heal. 

I sat out the next five days of workouts, repeating the Jena-recommended recovery circuit on my living room floor a few times a day. Shin boxes and hip bridges, gentle yoga and long walks. The trick, according to her, was to light up the glutes and remind the body which muscles it could reliably use. Or something like that. She’s the personal trainer; I’m just the girl with the busted back, trying to frame my healing in the context of progress. I am not being lazy. I am getting better. 

Mid-week, Jena messaged me on Instagram, just to check in, and when I returned to class the following Monday, she briefly stepped away from a personal training client to check in on my back. As I muscled a set of mid-weight kettlebells off the rack, I told her I was off the barbell for a bit and would be easing back into things. She gave me a “let’s go, Becca!” or a “nice work, Becca!” or something to that tune as I set up for my deadlift, walked myself through every one of Devin’s cues, and pulled, then upped my weight for the next set. I ended the workout with a big, dumb smile, knowing the injury didn’t take my strength away. 

It’s been a few weeks, and my back is still recovering; more realistically, it’s been five years, and the rest of me is still healing, too. There are days I feel like Daniel willingly re-entering the lion’s den when I step into a gym. Why do I still go to the place that hurt me so irreparably? Because it’s also the place that makes me better. The paradox of love, I suppose. But I have to keep it moving if I’m going to heal. 

I still ride the reverberations of something that was done to me in a gym six years ago, and while the pain is still there, it’s certainly gotten duller. I don’t completely lose my breath when someone says the words personal trainer, and I don’t always think of the grip-shaped bruise on my arm when I see a man who looks like Him pull the slack out of a barbell. Per legal requirements, I’ll never belong to the gym where I was raped again, nor would I ever want to, but there are other gyms and other coaches—personal trainers, even—that know better. They recognize my body as a thing to be known but not touched, to be checked in on and treated tenderly when it’s pushed past its limits. Wherever the trauma is stored in my body, I am building the muscle around it. You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe.