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Growing up, Jeff Black was just like every other kid, or at least that’s what it looked like from the outside. He spent most of the late ’80s doing what typical Southern boys did: riding bikes with his buddies, playing backyard baseball with his dad, and eating packed nights around his family’s dinner table. It wasn’t until he was eight years old that he realized what it meant to be different, what it meant to be vulnerable.
Black was born with osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), a genetic or inherited disorder in which your bones break too easily, often for no apparent reason. The exact number of people living with OI is unknown, but estimates suggest there are 25,000 to 50,000 in the U.S. alone. According to the Cleveland Clinic, there are about 20 different types of OI, ranging from severe, where you can break a rib when you sneeze, to mild (Type IV, which is what Black has), which can make the patient look normal but is more likely to break bones than people without OI.
Even though he remembers feeling different as a young child, his parents never confronted him and said, “Hey, you're weak.”
“I actually think I had the right mom and the right dad to do what I needed to do to get me to where I am today,” Black says. “There were no restrictions. There was no, 'Let's put you in a bubble, let's make sure you're safe.' It was, 'Hey, if you're broke, you're broken.'”
But his parents took precautions to make sure he was safe. Contact sports like football and wrestling were out of the question, so he spent most of his time riding his bike around the neighborhood, playing baseball and basketball, and even skateboarding on a skateboard his mother had given him, though she warned him that it could only be used on the driveway. But like most kids his age, Black followed his parents’ rules with his fingers tightly crossed behind his back. One afternoon in the spring of 1989, he sneaked over to a friend’s house on the most prominent hill in the neighborhood, better known to the kids as Super Hill, with his skateboard in tow.
A Life-Changing Accident
The boys decided to get together and see who could get to the top of the hill on their skateboards, first sitting down, then standing up. With his mother's pleas running through his head, Black felt invincible as he raced down the hill. Until, halfway down, a fit of fear made him jump off the board.
“The disgusting part was that I was going so fast that the momentum kept carrying me, so when my leg snapped violently, I remember screaming and taking another step under that same leg, rolling the rest of the way down the hill and stopping in front of this family's mailbox,” she wrote in her book. From Unbreakable to Unbreakable“Then the rest went dark.”
After the accident, Black was taken to the hospital where he would undergo the first of nine surgeries over the next six years. According to him, “From now on, nothing would be the same for me because on that hill there remained the innocent child I once was.”
The next few years were a mix of surgeries, more broken bones, full-body casts and a bone-stretching machine that doctors used to correct the one-inch difference left by rods placed in his previously broken right leg. For 12 weeks after the bone-stretching machine was attached to his leg, Black lived in pain from repeated fractures and the inability to walk until his doctor inadvertently broke both his tibia and fibula while trying to remove them.
“It's hard for me to reconcile what happened that day,” Black wrote. “Part of me smiled as I turned the key and took the wheel of the journey I was about to embark on, knowing it was the best thing that had ever happened to me.”
For the next few months, Black juggled school and physical therapy, becoming hyper-militant with his nightly stretches—his first taste of what it might feel like to have control over his own body since those days of skateboarding. Still, the next few years were a blur with more breaks, more surgeries, and the introduction of human growth hormone (HGH), which provided Black with his most consistent progress in physical therapy.
Finding a Way in the Weight Room
The year he entered high school in the late summer of 1995, his life changed, this time for the better. While most of his days were filled with pain and discomfort from sitting in unpadded chairs and trying to hide his limp as he walked through the halls, he made another discovery when he stepped into the weight room at the gym. He found comfort and purpose that lit a fire inside him like never before.
“Coach C was our high school football coach,” Black wrote. “Gym classes with him were always good, but things changed when he brought us into the basement under the gym where the weightlifting equipment was stored. I just stood there and stared at how raw and dirty it was. It wasn't the gym I was used to. Definitely not.”
As Black looked around the old school weight room, his eyes fixated on a board with all the athletes’ names and personal records. With a sinking feeling, he realized there was a good chance his name would never make it to the top of the list. Still, with a smile on his face, he headed over to the barbell rack and did a few sets of chest presses like he did in physical therapy. The trainer saw his sets and called him over to the bench to do a few reps like the other kids in the class. Black, a little tired, did one rep and maxed out at 95 pounds.
Consolation in the Gym
“I wasn't the weakest among the other kids, at least not for one day,” Black says of that moment. “For the first time in a long time, I felt like I belonged, and that was the day the trajectory would begin to change.”
High school wasn’t easy for Black. Between the ridicule from his classmates and the negative self-talk in his head, the weight room became his only solace.
“The gym was becoming a place where I could vent the energy I was tired of holding in and directing toward myself,” Black wrote. “Inside, sacred screams filled the air as I buried myself alive with internal dialogue fit for perverted ears. The aggression had to go somewhere, and naturally the gym became the place to embrace that energy.”
After working out regularly with a trainer at his local gym, Black began to realize that the gym could help him recover, at least in part. Of course, the first few years of gaining strength weren’t easy. After working too hard on the leg press machine, he developed a crack in his pelvis that ran from hip to hip. But the setback never stopped him from going back to the gym. Although he loved working out, he first came across a bodybuilding magazine when he went to the grocery store with his mom at lunchtime.
“Finding that magazine changed the entire course of my life,” Black says. “Everything about who I was changed because of that discovery. My self-confidence resurfaced as I found a new identity that I could relate to.”
Pushing Back Against What Makes Us Uncomfortable
After college, the next few years of Black's life were filled with endless hours at the gym, a handful of steroid cycles, and some odd jobs that allowed him to work around a set training schedule and still make enough money to survive. During this time, he struggled with sleep deprivation and fought daily against the darkness that threatened to swallow him.
His passion for bodybuilding and the discipline he put into pulling himself out of that darkness gave him the strength to keep going and become the person he is today.
Since his first competition in 2006, Jeff has continued to defy the odds, working to improve his physique each day and help others do the same. For the past 19 years, Black has dedicated his life to helping people become the best versions of themselves as a personal trainer and co-owner of Iron House Strength and Conditioning in Nashville, TN.
“I’ve been able to teach people from all walks of life. CEOs, housewives and everyone in between,” Black says. “Most people have regrets, and I think we always have to understand that what we go through is painful, but if we arrive there with a bunch of regrets, the end result is even more painful. So I embrace the whole [thinking of] 'Do not live your life securely; try to reach death exhausted.'
No matter what you've been through, no one escapes life without at least a few bumps, bruises, and tough encounters. To Black, it's not what you've been through that matters, it's who you choose to be despite everything that weighs you down.
“Trauma comes in all forms,” she wrote. “It strikes us when we least expect it, and it takes courage to stand up to what fights like hell to consume us. Be proud that you made it through another round.”