There’s always been a push to treat the body as a temple, with constant reminders that we only get one, so we want to stop them from breaking down for as long as possible.

That said, plenty of people push their bodies to the extreme for reasons unknown (or known) – and here are a few of them.

Worst pain ever.

The whole Appalachian trail was pretty tough but so spread out it didn’t seem that bad.

Thought long distance hiking (trail legs) = marathon (running legs)….that was NOT the case.

Worst pain ever.

Took almost 2 years to enjoy running in any form then I ran a 50 mile ultra marathon a few weeks ago, proper training kept the pain at bay

Age was definitely a factor.

I was paralysed from the waist down due to a spinal cord injury. Doctors said never walking again was a big possibility.

4-6 hours a day the past 3-4 years was dedicated to rehab (massaging, stretching and exercises).

After the first year I was walking again, but I couldn’t stand up for too long.

Now I climb, swim and weight lift! Deadlift is at 180kg, Squat is 155kg, Front squat 110 all at the BW of 74kg

I think it helped that I’m only 25, but the body does amazing things given the time and effort to care for it properly.

A combination of things.

Over a year and a half of waking up at 3:45am for a minimum of 12 hour shift work in a manual labour position (often over 16 hours).

Regularly went days without seeing any sunlight. Was fighting homelessness so had to.

Unfortunately, it took its toll on my health and I fell into alcohol dependency and d**g abuse as well as excessive eating (yeah I get the irony that these are pretty counterproductive to avoiding being homeless).

Thankfully that was a long time ago and now I’ve lost 100lbs in weight, don’t do dr**s and can enjoy alcohol without depending on it.

No other choice.

9 months of cancer therapy.

Not good at all.

Anorexia. I was tired of being one of the chubby kids, so I just starved myself. Went from like 180 to 110 in about a month and a half. Got to 90lbs at one point in college and started getting lesions and passing out and shit. Prolly not good.

Back from the edge.

Alcoholism. I got blackout drunk off of whiskey every night and 2-3x a day on the weekends for months. Plus about a year on either side of that heavily drinking beer daily, but those liquor hangovers are unmatched.

You don’t know a real hangover until you’ve laid in the bed in the fetal position shaking and sweating for hours. I can’t believe I was able to function like that for a sustained period of time.

A dangerous hobby.

Motorcycle accident. Fractured my skull at a couple of places, burst an eardrum.

No good.

Severe alcoholism for a year, to the point where I was drinking straight mouthwash. Lots of hospitalizations. I’m 29 and got sober from alcohol when I was 18 and relapsed when I was 28.

It literally started right where I left off when I was 18. Horrible. Alcohol is no good.

Middle school is the worst.

Endured constant fights for 3 years in middle school as someone who was 4’9 back then.

Had to walk away.

Being there for someone caught in addiction. The late night calls to come take care of them, the countless trips and hours in the hospital.

The mood swings and all of it started taking a toll on me physically to the point I started feeling like I was the one using.

I had to walk away after realizing there was nothing I could do. She lost her battle a little over a year ago and it tore me up.

Still working through it but it’s a daily process. Rip LD and I hope you finally have peace.

Horrible treatment.

Treatment for leukemia. The preparation for stem cell transplant includes getting a lethal dose of radiation. Dosages differ depending on the protocol your doctors follow but I got 3 Grays of whole body radiation from a radiation gun in a twenty minute exposure. It didn’t feel like much while it was happening, but I did pass out at 18 minutes and 30 seconds. This is expected. They strap you into a harness in case it happens so they can continue the dosage as intended.

They do it because the radiation dosage’s main side effect is that it wholly wipes out your existing, cancerous bone marrow and preps your body to accept the transplanted stem cells (delivered by a specially prepared blood transfusion).

The recuperation took 6 to 9 months. The first week in a hospital, daily visits to a specialty clinic for weeks afterwards, slowly tapering to less frequent visits for months after. I’m almost at 2 years post transplant, still in remission, my immune system getting better daily but still immunocompromised. I’m almost finished redoing all my childhood vaccines, and just got off my transplant meds at the beginning of July. Things are going pretty smoothly, I never got Graft versus Host Disease (which is common in transplant patients), and if I stay in remission another 3 years, may be considered cured.

Fingers crossed! But some days it feels mundane and other days I feel like Walter Mitty.

Never the best option.

I injured my calf playing basketball. Didn’t have health insurance at the time (god bless the USA), so decided to not go to ER and treat it myself for a bit to see if it gets better.

Friends convinced me it was a high ankle sprain, probably. I iced it, took some ibuprofen, got a boot and a cane from the pharmacy and went to work the next day (I’m a camera operator / dop for tv shows). I got a sports massage on the calf (hurt like hell) and the pain got better in a week or so. Still didn’t have range of motion and it was swollen and slightly bruised. Kept working.

My friend was getting married in St Martin and I promised to film his wedding. So I dragged my ass all the way there from Los Angeles and as I was laying on the beach, one of the wedding guests came up to see why I wasn’t swimming.

She looked at my leg and immediately said “I’m an MRI technician and you have a ruptured achilles”. I couldn’t sleep googling it all night. The swelling, the bruising, the loss of range of motion all checked out. Dragged my ass back to LA, got officially married to my fiancé, bought health insurance, went to a doc .. yup, completely ruptured achilles.

45 days I was schlepping around like that with it untreated. Got surgery, had brutal recovery and had to walk down the aisle with a boot and a cane.

Therapy is good.

Dr**s and divorce, separate incidents. Dr**s were mostly hallucinogens which eventually led me to a severe psychological breakdown that took me the better part of two – three years to fully recover from. Six months I couldn’t even work.

Sober over ten years but eventually replaced them with alcohol which caused its own problems and contributed to what’s happening now and that’s going through a separation after nearly 21 years together.

That is proving to be nearly as damaging psychologically just in a different way. At least this time I can partially afford a therapist.

Their heart can’t take it.

I was really heavy on my grind for years, taking caffeine pills, Adderall and drinking coffee all the time….

one night it was so bad that I could feel my kidneys throbbing, my back was sore from dehydration…my chest was bumping so hard that it sounded like a drum in my ear.

I thought to myself, maybe I should go to the hospital.

What I ended up doing was going right back to sleep.

To this day, my heart can’t take much stress or I get chest pains.

A wild ride.

Currently pregnant with my first kid and realizing how wild this  is.

Organs relocate themselves, stuff starts hurting in places you didn’t know existed.

So bananas.

Pregnancy for sure.

It is absolutely bananas how much strain it puts on your body and how much it changes your body. Some of those changes are permanent. My feet are slightly bigger now because my entire body had to loosen up everything.

It literally changed my brain. My brain will never be the same. My emotions will never be what they were before having a kid.

Then labor & delivery was bananas too. At 29 weeks, doctors pumped me full of IV fluids, magnesium, and antibiotics while describing to me everything that could happen. Every single possible scenario of what might happen to my son. All while they’re sticking me with a steroid shot and putting a picc line in. I delivered vaginally at 31 weeks and they pumped me full of magnesium and fluids again then while my brain was a whirlwind of emotions and fear, all while pushing out a baby that I wasn’t sure would survive or what complications he might have.

I hold him now at almost 2 years old and it’s absolutely unbelievable that I grew him in me.

Bananas. So bananas.

Yeah, I’m glad none of these happened to me.

That’s one of the nice things about getting older!