People lift weights at Fitness SF inside Salesforce Transit Center as a person ascends on an escalator to the bus terminal level in San Francisco on March 22, 2023.

People move to San Francisco and become tech bros. I moved to San Francisco and became a gym bro.  

This month marks a year since I began seriously lifting weights. Three times a week for the past 52 weeks, I’ve pumped iron at the gym, slowly gaining aptitude at exercises that I once associated with the impenetrable, intimidating, inaccessible world of grunting men in tank tops. 

It may seem absurd to say that deadlifts and squats and bench presses changed my life. Then again, it wasn’t long ago that I couldn’t lift a coffee cup without excruciating pain. 

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In late 2023, I started experiencing persistent aches and pains in my fingers and wrists. Sometimes the pain was so bad that I had to take deep breaths to complete tasks as simple as putting my hair up or buttoning a shirt. 

But doctors took X-rays and said everything looked fine, so I resigned myself to wrapping athletic tape around my joints and sleeping in drugstore wrist braces. 

Then, in September of 2024, I fell. 

While on a run near Fort Mason, I was so caught up in the gorgeous views of the Bay that I didn’t notice the uneven sidewalk until I hit the ground, blood gushing from my right knee. My wrists hurt, too, but at first I didn’t think much of it.

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A few days later, however, my right wrist was so swollen that shaking someone’s hand at work sent me........

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