How to not get injured like I did

I also discuss my "asslessness"

Maybe I’ve been lying by omission, though radical transparency has never been one of my brand pillars so maybe it’s fine? In any case, I came here to disclose that I haven’t played tennis in four months. It has nothing to do with winter.

I have a herniated disc; a budget MRI ($250) I got in a moldy basement in Astoria told me so. If you’re a silly billy freelancer without health insurance like me, $250 is a very good price for an MRI (start here if you’re in New York and need one). The caveat is that the price was, for me, the only palatable thing about the experience. Permit me a quick, floral meandering wherein I dump my trauma upon you.

So, the basement. Once I descended there, a middle-aged Russian woman with translucent skin rose silently from her chair and glided toward me with the kind of frailty no-one wants from a health practitioner. Her glazed-over eyes were fully committed to the middle distance, making it unclear if she’d actually seen me or just felt that someone was there.

This woman led me to the machine—as much as an eerie, amorphous person can lead—mumbling and shuffling and come to think of it, probably sleepwalking. To be fair, she couldn’t have settled me with coherence or conviction. Swampy smells usurped my nostrils, meaning mold was nigh. Just basements upholding their rep, as it were! Cortisol soaring, armpits soggy, I thought only of how mold in my Bed Stuy apartment took me out last year.

She didn’t meet my eyes to hand me protective goggles, instead staring blankly ahead (shout out Vanessa Carlton) while I submitted to a thousand miles of ear-shredding tones that had me believing the year was 1998 and the locale was my family’s *computer room*—though the suffering lasted much longer than a dial-up modem connecting to the internet. Do we all agree that MRIs are insane?? Lmk.

It’s so true that everyone has a story and that was mine! The events described above culminated in a sobering fact: I have a herniated disc, which is when “the inner gel-like core of a spinal disc pushes through a tear or weak point in the tough outer layer” (spine-health.com).

Prior to knowing, I really didn’t want to know, so instead I played through tension and stiffness—and eventually, actual pain—for months. I can probably even trace the demise of my back to a recurring ankle injury from four years ago that returned last summer. I played through both chapters. What are signs for if not ignoring them?? There was pain; nevertheless, she persisted.

So let me just say that this is a hard thing to write about—not because it hurts to sit, and also, tragically, to sneeze—but because it reveals the mistakes and character deficiencies that got me here in the first place.

If you are maybe on the edge of an injury, here are three things you shouldn’t do that I did:

1. Don’t be a masochist

Really loving something and wanting to do it all the time should obviously stop when discomfort starts. Well-adjusted people know this. You know this is not what I did; I said that already.

But no-one can accuse me of giving up when the going got tough! In this case, I call masochism. Tennis has the audacity to ask a lot of you. To bend double like a boomerang to coax a low ball from your shoelaces, then haul ass to the opposite sideline and stretch to meet the next ball. All the twisting; all the sharp, fast, changes of direction. A direction I should have taken is way the fuck away from the tennis court, a place located conveniently across the street from my apartment; a place that takes vulnerable backs and renders them idle. (Quick somewhat related fact (sports, being out of the game): if you’re on the bench in my native country, Australia, you’re in the sin bin. Funny Christian cunts we are.)

If you need someone to tell you to swim instead of going to a HIIT class, or to sometimes walk instead of run, or to take foam rolling more seriously, I will be that person. Do as I say and not as I do!!!!!

2. Don’t ignore strength training

The thing about being a 37-year-old woman is that you need muscle. Bones dwindle with age and lest layers begin to flake from shaft like pencil shavings, you’ll need muscles to protect them. Furthermore! My hamstrings are “flaccid” according to the trainer I’ve started seeing, a man. There’s plenty to be offended about here, but miraculously I was not—my hamstrings are flaccid, especially compared with my quads which he said are tank without saying tank. It’s a matter of imbalance I’d never had to consider until now—tennis doesn’t specifically strengthen hamstrings, and you need strong ones (and a strong butt) to properly stabilize that big, beautiful back.

Where I previously couldn’t reconcile my distaste for the gym with needing to stay injury-free, I’ve more recently purchased ten sessions with he who called me flaccid. I tried to make sure they were very expensive—$180 each—so that I feel suitably dumb/bullied/committed. That’s my burden to bear on the treatment front. For you, on the prevention front, I’d suggest isolating your hamstrings on the leg curl machine, and doing step ups onto a box whilst holding the heaviest dumbbells you can. Mind-numbingly boring but effective.

3. Don’t sit at a desk for eight hours a day

Sitting was declared the new smoking in 2010, the same year Instagram sowed its seeds and captured our attention with latte art. I’ve been sitting down ever since. I work and I sit and I sit and I sit. Very unremarkable; very similar for you maybe? (Also: all this sitting, I fear, has bequeathed to me a flat ass that pairs perfectly with my flaccid hamstrings. Or maybe my asslessness is simply by virtue of genetics—Asians are not known for their fat dumpers.)

I don’t mean to be so unimaginative and sexualize an overly sexualized sport—but 90s Martina Hingis really highlights my shortfalls.

Well, in 2024 I oversat. Now I stand before my desk with my laptop perched on one of these vile things. A thing that invites bemused looks from my studio brethren. A thing that affords me the feeling of flailing in the piss-filled shallow end wearing a life vest. Or wearing a crash helmet with black marker eyes to walk through the park in case of magpies. All because I was stubborn and resistant to change.

Being an upstanding citizen the whole day through is not a look, but I do feel better for it. If your back worries you even some, I suggest toggling between sitting, standing, and walking in a single work day.

You can find me in the club.

Finally, my ears are splayed open for comments from anyone who strength-trained their way out of a herniated disc and avoided surgery. “Fear never builds the future, but hope does.” —Joe Biden.