The young woman continued pressing, and I suddenly felt a click and a sense of relief as something settled into place.
“What was that?” I asked.
“There are all these little sacs at the joints that help keep everything moving,” she said, “and sometimes they get an air bubble around them and it can inhibit normal function. Just makes things feel stuck. That’s what that was—getting the air out.”
Like a fart.
Over the last few weeks I’d come to approach these sessions with a mixture of enthusiasm and dread. I liked learning about the inner workings of my body and getting back on a path toward the fitness and physical confidence I’d had in my youth, back when I was a decent dancer—balanced and graceful, with an ear for the music and enough ability to contort myself into most positions the choreography called for. The dance studio had been one place where my height felt like an asset, giving me the long lines dance teachers and choreographers find praiseworthy, rather than a thing I’d always tried to minimize, whether by wearing flats or by standing with one hip thrust to the side so I could be roughly on the same level as everybody else.
I’d stopped dancing in college but had tried to remain active, going for the occasional run along the river near campus or swimming laps in a pool. Except for the height, I’d always been fairly comfortable with how my body looked, but wanted to keep pushing what it could do. Shortly after I graduated, I was in a car accident that left me with a concussion, a broken cheekbone, a wrenched back, some cracked teeth, and a lingering sense of my body as fragile, a thing I needed to handle with great care—a sense of vulnerability I never shed.
Once I’d recovered—and found myself weak and closing in on 190 pounds—I slowly got fitter, intermittently swimming, running, and working out in the gym. As a result, the exercises I performed out on the shiny maple rehab floor felt as comfortable as an old shoe: leg lifts and step-ups with my ankle tethered to one or another color-coded elastic band, bright pops of cheer in an otherwise colorless environment.
But then there was the hands-on segment: agonizing, allegedly therapeutic manipulations that felt anything but and left me on occasion with bruises stippling my thigh. Contributing to my pain, my therapist said, was tightness in my quad and iliotibial, or IT, band, something that plagues a lot of people who run, which was about the only real exercise I’d been doing before the injury with anything approaching regularity. Another thick connector that aids in stabilizing the knee, the IT band travels from the pelvis down the outer thigh and across the knee to the shinbone and isn’t easily loosened up. The prescribed cure is to roll these rigid muscles and fibers against a stiff foam tube at home and submit to massage treatment at the clinic, both of which hovered at the edge of my pain tolerance.
“When you find a spot that hurts,” the therapist told me as she showed me how to roll, “just stay on it.”
“For how long?” I asked.
“At least two minutes. More if you can take it.” I could barely tolerate one.
No pain, no gain—in exercise it was a mantra I believed in, but PT stood for personal torture, pure and simple, and the only way to get through it was to stay focused on the imaginings that distracted me at work and animated my dreams at night. In them I would glide across a satin celadon curtain, barely conscious of the board beneath my feet, the foam of the breaking wave tickling my heels as it propelled me on and on and on. Given how slowly I was progressing with the knee, I would probably have to wait until spring to try realizing that vision, but by then I wanted to be ready. I was convinced that my injury and most of my problems in the sport—my inability to paddle, my lack of stamina, my lousy pop-up—stemmed from being weak and stiff, byproducts of putting in long hours at my desk, talking on the phone, writing, and typing. I wasn’t entirely out of shape, but I was nowhere near where I needed to be.
The surfers I’d stumbled upon in Montauk had made it all look so effortless, so easy, as if their boards were magic carpets motoring them across the water, but I had come to see how deceptive that image was. “People learn to surf very quickly when they surf every day,” my first instructor, Sean, had told me in Montauk. They also learn quickly when they start learning young, he might have added, since it just gets harder to teach the body new tricks as it ages.
That’s true for any activity, but perhaps more so for surfing, which engages muscles practically from head to toe with combinations of motions that just don’t come up in daily routines or in many other sports. As in swimming, paddling relies on muscles big and small in the arms, shoulders, chest, and back. The pop-up requires the strength and flexibility of a yogi, while steering the board demands the power and agility in the lower body—waist, hips, butt, legs, feet—of a basketball player or skier to maintain balance and position while rotating, arching, and shifting your weight around the board to extend the ride. With the heavy emphasis on paddling and springing, surfing is particularly challenging for women, who don’t tend to pack the same kind of upper-body strength as men. Sports researchers comparing small groups of male and female surfers have found that women tend to pop up more slowly, a result, the researchers concluded, of less maximum strength and a lower speed in applying it—essentially deficits of force and power. Sure, an elite athlete like Tom Brady can pick up surfing later in life. But I couldn’t even execute a proper push-up on my living room floor, much less in rapidly moving water while jumping up and pivoting to land in the right spot along the center line of the board.
Determined to fix that, I got in touch with Jonathan, my friend from my job at 7 Days, who worked out with a trainer a few times a week. Jonathan said the training was the only thing that had stopped the debilitating back spasms that had laid him low over the years and had kept him from injury as he began pursuing tennis with gusto. “Rob’s great—he’s kind of gentle,” Jonathan told me. “He just knows how to push without being an asshole, and he’s cute and fun and charming.”
That was enough of an endorsement for me. I made an appointment for the first Tuesday in November and, after a morning of work calls from my apartment in Brooklyn, headed to the private gym in NoHo where Rob held his training sessions. It was a little before noon when I got off the F train at the corner of Broadway and Houston and made my way toward Lafayette Street and then up a few blocks to Great Jones. It was sunny and warm for the season—probably fifty degrees—and the bright light was bathing the littered sidewalks, uneven cobblestones, old tenements, and factory-buildings-turned-expensive-apartments in a golden glow. I passed an imposing brick building that served as a shelter for homeless women and peered at a white cast-iron loft building with a blue mansard roof that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Paris. I looked up the avenue past the Greek Revival townhouses of Colonnade Row and the Renaissance-style facade of the Public Theater toward the black steel cube sculpture at Astor Place, thinking about how much time I’d spent at those crossroads.
The office for that first magazine job had been right up the street, not far from the punk-lite bustle of St. Marks Place, where I’d come with friends in high school to buy the fishnets, Sid Vicious buttons, and vintage dresses that made us—high-achieving private-school kids—feel like rebels. Working as an editorial assistant and then a junior editor, I had spent most of my time helping my bosses produce articles, but I also got to dabble in assigning and editing stories of my own. Playing at being a grown-up, I’d take writers and agents to lunch at in-the-know little hotspots and head out after work to book parties and film screenings and beers and burgers with young colleagues, feeling like we were some new incarnation of the downtown publishing folk who had toiled and eaten and drank and smoked in some of the same places we did.