Article provided by: S. Radley from The Spec
All that was left of his grueling, months-long training plan before heading off to the world masters’ powerlifting championships was one final heavy lift. Just finish one more massive hoist then rest for a couple of days until it was time to compete.
After loading 625 pounds of plates onto the bar — roughly the equivalent of three full-size refrigerators — he grabbed it, bent his knees and began to rise as he’d done hundreds and hundreds of times before.
Which is when he heard the grotesque pop.
“My bicep tendon tore right off my arm,” Andy Childs says.
Disgusting? Yeah, sorry. Hope you weren’t eating while you were reading that.
Anyway, the 44-year-old fitness club owner and two-time national champion braced for the ensuing flash of agony but it never arrived, only because there aren’t nerve endings at that spot. Still, when he placed the bar back down, he knew something was seriously wrong because the muscle had rolled up like an unblown New Years’ noisemaker and was now in a ball at his shoulder.
By the next day, his entire arm looked like it had been soaked in grape press. A week later, bad turned worse when he had excruciating reattachment surgery that involved drilling through a bone in his forearm and weaving the tendon through the hole and back into place.
That was May 2008.
A year later, Childs amazingly rehabbed himself, got back to training and won a silver medal in the squat and a bronze in the deadlift at the world championship, leading to an overall third-place finish.
To the average guy who whines and complains about his sore back when he has to hoist a full box of Christmas decorations up from the basement, hearing about a guy coming back from an injury like that to lift again surely serves as confirmation that the concept of powerlifting smacks of some form of masochistic looniness.
Yet, if that’s the case, what does it mean if a guy does it a second time?
Just a few days after setting personal bests at the Ontario championships early in his comeback at the start of 2010, Childs was working on his squat when he heard another pop. This time it came from his knee. And this time he didn’t escape the pain.
“I finished the lift,” the Ancaster resident says. “I did another set to make sure it was damaged and then went to have it examined.”
Turns out, yes, a loud popping noise combined with excruciating anguish equals a problem. In this case a torn meniscus. With surgery not available for several months, he continued to train — “like an idiot,” he laughs — until it could be repaired.
When it finally happened in July, the surgeon told him never to jump, lunge or squat again. Ever.
So, of course, a couple months later he was back under the bar. Preparing at full speed to get back into the sport, this time in the Classic category that doesn’t require participants to wear supportive equipment such as those incredibly tight singlets he laughingly admits makes guys look like they’re being squeezed through a sausage press.
Two years after his last competition, a not quite bionic but certainly rebuilt Childs returned to the sport and won the whole event. Not only that, he set Canadian records in the deadlift (606 pounds), the bench press (371 pounds) and total weight moved (1,477 pounds). Considering where he came from — and that he only took up the sport in 2005 — it was an amazing accomplishment.
Early in the new year, he’ll be gunning for a provincial title. The nationals follow in April. The worlds are later in the year. He’ll be looking for another handful of medals and a few more record certificates.
As long as he doesn’t hear anything pop, that is.
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