Armouring up for Ascent

2024/25 was the chapter of my peak athletic performance (peaking at Kilimanjaro on 11th July 2025), when I unknowingly built a reinforcement shield that saved my arse on 1st Jan 2026 #EventHorizon.

A Close Call Saved by Structural Integrity (refer to Event Horizon) Thank you to two years of 1.5x bodyweight deadlifts and back squats. Thank you for armouring up my anterior and posterior chains; you were my reinforcement shield. You were strong enough to work together and dissipate the momentum of that blunt force through my joints and muscle fibres, firing me back up and out rather than letting me be swallowed. Without you, gravity would’ve had nowhere to go but straight through my skeletal system in an exorcism crash.

Deadlifts, you built the intra-abdominal pressure that acted as a shock-absorbing shield, protecting my core from a far worse fate. Your training automatically braced my erector spinae and reinforced my dancer-built obliques with added muscle and bone density. That “natural girdle” allowed my posterior chain to absorb the majority of the kinetic energy, reducing the damage to my left flank. You converted that impact into an elastic recoil forceful enough to defy gravity for a split second, reversing my momentum to shoot me OUT. Without you? That impact would have macerated my tissues and collapsed me back into that abyss, never to be found.

Thank you to a lifetime of Kuthu dance and boxing snaps. You allowed me to bounce and redirect that blunt force into the elastic “shoot-out” that got me the fuck out of that hole. My “Jack Russell” boxing punches—hitting with maximum force but retracting instantly to avoid the counter—share the same mechanical DNA as my Tamil Street Dance. Thousands of hours of explosive footwork and bone-deep elasticity triggered an instinctive counter-punch against the edge that tried to crush me. Thank you for letting me use that death-trap as a springboard to pivot up and out.

Thank you to lifelong dancing proprioception. You built spatial awareness into my DNA so that even when the fall dumped my consciousness out of the vehicle, my body knew how to tuck and twist in the darkness to protect my critical zones. Thank you for plyometric intelligence. Every time I landed a jump in the past, my muscles absorbed 5–10x my bodyweight and converted it into the next move. This eccentric loading taught my muscles to instinctively load like a rubber band upon impact.

Thank you, Mountains and Dormant Volcanoes. High-altitude endurance training increased my capillary density and red blood cell count. When my kidney ruptured and I began losing blood internally, my system was already “supercharged” to transport oxygen to my brain and heart despite the dropping volume. Without this athlete’s armour of structural integrity, gravity would have pulverised my soft tissues, shattered my pelvis, and burst my spine. I would have either died or been pulled out of that hole in a sedentary, paralysed body—in which case, I’d have fucked off to Switzerland for euthanasia.

What’s terrifying is that I was one grade away from losing the organ entirely, and a tiny step away from a major vessel bleed-out. My Grade 4 ruptured left kidney had its critical zone exposed when the outer layer bled away into a haematoma. If that internal vessel had been cut? I would’ve bled out instantly, right there in the hole.