The Faceplant At Gold’s Gym

by John Hawkins | July 16, 2008 11:26 am

A few days ago, I was working legs at Gold’s Gym and I decided to try doing step exercises, which is something I don’t normally do.

So, I walk up to a step, which is essentially a wide plastic stool, and I do a few left-legged steps and despite the fact that I had already walked three miles and done some other exercises, I got nothing out of it. Too easy.

At that point, I decided to up the difficulty level a bit by adding a 2nd step on top of the first one. I then moved both steps right up against the wall so that they wouldn’t slip, grabbed a 20 pound dumbbell in each hand, and started stepping.

I could tell this was going to actually work my legs as the number of repetitions climbed — one tiny problem though.

As I get to the top of the step, at the peak of the movement while I am standing on my left leg, the top step must have become loose, because it slid out backwards.

In a ninjatastic feat of coordination, I didn’t lose my balance despite the fact that I was standing on an uneven step that was now behind me, but my head was rocketing towards the wall and because it was happening so fast, I didn’t have the wherewithal to drop the dumbbells and put my hands up.

However, I did have enough body control to slow, but not stop my descent. Still, my head slammed into the wall with a dull thud, right at about the hairline.

After that, I quickly dropped the dumbbells, used my own forehead as a pivot, and turned to place my back against the wall.

At that point, an incident that happened when I was younger flashed through my mind.

I had headed out to a field across from my house with a kid from the neighborhood with a 9 iron and several golf balls in tow. Even through neither of us knew the first thing about golf, we figured we’d hit a few balls and see if either of us was the next Jack Nicklaus.

However, I — knowing nothing about golf and having the finely honed danger sense of the average 12 year old, which is to say that I had no idea what I was doing — stood right behind my friend as he swung the club. And by “right behind my friend,” I mean right behind the metal golf club he was swinging which caught me forcefully in the forehead on his backswing.

After he hit me, I said “Owwww,” but didn’t think too much of it. That’s because there aren’t a lot of nerves in the forehead and it’s generally not too painful to take even a hard blow there. However, the other kid looked absolutely horrified, which was, as I came to find out in short order, because he had busted my forehead wide open. I learned that when an ocean of blood flooded into my eyes and down my face, in a gash that I had to have stitched back together later that day at the hospital.

……Which brings me back to Gold’s Gym, my head, and the wall. There was someone else working out near by. He saw the whole thing, gave me a “Are you all right?” and immediately I was thinking, “Oh man, I bet I have another gusher and I’ll have to spend the next four hours sitting in an emergency room waiting to get sewed up. What a way to spend a night.”

So, I asked the guy, “I am bleeding?” He was like, “a little.” I headed over to the mirror and happily, that area was just violently scraped, bruised, and later formed a nice, oblong knot.

But happily, I had avoided once again getting my head split open like a ripe grape.

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