On stage, Jeff Black looks just like another bodybuilder. If you saw him at Jr. Nationals last year, you might even say he needs to improve his posing because he doesn't look stable in his side poses.... Yeah, everyone .jpg)
is a critic. But, you know, you should never judge a book by its cover. Imagine having bones so brittle they just break. Imagine being an 11 year-old kid walking through a store with your family and your leg breaks. For no reason, it just breaks. Imagine that kid growing up to be a bodybuilder? You're kidding right?
Meet Jeff Black. He's a guy with a dream who wakes up and lives it despite the potential for innumerable setbacks. . . he posed onstage at the 2010 NPC Jr Nationals with a stress fracture in his left tibia (now you know why those side poses looked unstable). Jeff has a brittle bone disease called Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI). Specifically, he's got Type IV, which manifests moderate to severe bone breaking. This means that some people afflicted with disease can merely sneeze and break ribs! In fact, the Type II version of the disease is lethal. Most people don't realize but most SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) cases are found out to have OI after post-mortem testing is done. The disease is a genetic fault that basically prevents the body from properly absorbing and utilizing calcium. When a healthy person breaks a bone, the bone comes back stronger and better than before. In people with OI, the bone comes back weaker. At any moment, with Jeff's specific version of the disease, he can break a bone. His broken leg in the department store was just one of many. He was actually was born with both of legs broken! Since then he has had 18 surgeries on his legs to install rods, plates, screws, nails, etc. just to keep him walking. At one point during that barrage of surgeries, doctors told him that he might never walk. If he did, they told him, it would be with canes and crutches. In preparation of that, his parents took Jeff to the gym and hired a personal trainer to strengthen his upper body. And so his journey began.
Now, I'm sure you could imagine that having IO ould have potential dangers when it comes to lifting heavy weights. How about light weights, period? When Jeff was 14 he broke his pelvis doing leg presses. He was in school being teased by his classmates who were calling him "cripple." So he went to the weight room to take out his anger. He loaded up the leg press with a whopping 9 pounds - a lot of weight for him at the time; he came down with the weight and his pelvis just broke! He had a hairline fracture that went all the way from the left side of his pelvis to the right. In excruciating pain he crawled out of the leg press, got to his feet, and managed to hobble over to a phone and call his mom. At the hospital they gave him more crutches. But, Jeff was so tired of using them and being teased that he decided to walk with his hair-line fractured pelvis and deal with the pain until it healed.
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About 6 months later he suffered another fracture, this time around the steel rod that had been installed during one of his earlier surgeries to stabilize his leg. There was not much they could do about it, so he just said fuck it and went on with life and kept training. When Jeff was 17 he broke his tibia in half playing basketball. This time they put him in a cast, and he still continued to weight train. Eventually, Jeff got respect from the gym guys. They didn't tease him any more; they helped him. They would load plates on for him, or drag dumbbells over to him. Many of them knew of his disease and were always ready to help. When Jeff was 23 he snapped his left arm in half benching 315. That required a complete rotator cuff surgery and IT nailing of his left humerus bone.
Through all these injuries - and there were certainly a lot more- Jeff has always gone back to the gym a few days later if not the next day. The gym is his salvation. In his quieter moments Jeff laments that he probably shouldn't have survived as long as he has. But he has achieved the impossible. By working out and bodybuilding he has, in essence, built a shield around his bones that enables him to live the life he wanted to live. It allows him to do simple things such as pick his son up without worrying about his arms breaking, or walking up stairs without wondering if his leg would give out again. The rest of us take so much for granted these days that it's nearly impossible to fathom the idea that every time we walk into a gym we might be carried out on a stretcher. Jeff lives that fear every workout, yet he still keeps going.
Bodybuilding is everything to Jeff. He hopes that his story will get out there and show the world that bodybuilding can enable you to do things in life that you might feel are impossible or out of reach. Too many people spend their days dreaming and never living. Jeff is one of the rare few who does both. He gives that blessing back t.jpg)
o others by being a full-time trainer and teaching his clients that through sacrifice comes strength and then self-renewal.
Jeff's message is that today is what matters. We can't change the past and we can't live in the future. The moments set us free and within these moments we all have to cherish them. Every step he takes is a step of freedom from crutches and canes. Every breath he takes, he takes without the fear of breaking a rib, and every night he goes to sleep he hopes to wake up one day closer to his goals and dreams becoming reality.
Bodybuilding is based on motivation' the motivation to be better than yourself. I hope Jeff's story touches your life in some way and helps you realize how great it is to be part of this "thing of ours". The next time you don't feel like training, or you can't find the steam to go all out, think of Jeff. Think about how it must feel to be him. Then buckle down and give it your all. You are not going to break anything but the mental roadblocks to progress.
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