Healing one of the biggest regrets of my life, a 30-year process

The more I look back on my life, the more I recognise it took me so long to come to my senses.  In my opinion, overall, the truest biblical truth is “there’s nothing new under the sun.”  As life is cause and effect, if you do certain things, you can expect certain consequences.  If I took a while to come to my senses, I need to extend grace to everyone else who takes a while to come to theirs.  The normal flow of life is kids grow up at home, many leave the home for a time (can be 20 years) like the prodigal son, then they return home when they come to their senses.

This article is a mix of present reflection over a time of my life 30 years ago, originally written 22 years ago.  There are many messages in this story; goals met yet also failure, folly, regret, vanity, risks taken

The rest of this is what I originally wrote, interspersed by thoughts of now:

I took up weight training when I was twenty and soon found I was a natural.  I had a determination that was founded through a combination of natural persistence and a reaction to some adverse treatment from my apprenticeship (if you’re interested, here’s part of that story).  I would often be walking home from the Disco in Karratha at midnight or so, thinking “I’m going to show them!”  ‘Them’ was sometimes my peers, sometimes people at the Water Authority where I worked as an apprentice, and sometimes it was myself.

I would sometimes want to prove to myself I was capable of better.  I regretted in some ways that I’d not given cricket a go in Perth when I was encouraged to enter grade cricket at 16 by my ex-first-grade cricket coach, Ralph Gurr.  He obviously saw potential in me, and given time, the right breaks, and of course the right connections, I could have played first grade cricket.  Like everyone who plays cricket, I dreamed of playing first class or Test cricket.

Football was the other passion.  As far as football was concerned, I always had good ball handling skills.  I’d worked hard to develop them.  I was one of four (out of 130) in the Karratha Junior Football Club to receive the gold award for skills when I was 15.  But I had one major problem.  I didn’t read the play as well as the most talented footballers.  My two brothers could read the play well and had excellent skills and even longer kicks than I did.

I had a real strong desire to excel in some kind of sporting endeavour.

This is where bodybuilding fitted in.

When I started, I developed strength very quickly, and even before I left Karratha, I could squat over 150 kg and bench press over 100 kg for reps.  As with most things, the more you get the more you want.  I remember doing workouts with a friend and I think I used to frighten him with my 100% attitude.  I certainly frightened my father when he saw me doing calf raises with 200 kg attached to the home air-conditioner.  Looking back, I was an animal when it came to weight training, which is fine for getting results, but does little to consider the other people affected.

This is the ideal segue into the topic of taking anabolic steroids.  When I started training, I never considered I would end up taking them.  I really didn’t need them, to be perfectly honest, because I was getting great gains both in body size and the weights I could push.

The way the first course of steroids I took came about was bizarre.  I had helped a bodybuilding partner out with a loan, and the only way he could pay me back was through the provision of oral and injectable steroids.  I was certainly curious at this point as to what gains I might get from taking them.  I was approximately 88 kg at the time, and in pretty good nick, but I felt I could use an edge. One night in February 1989, I had my first injection in the buttock with 1 ml of Primabolin Depot.  The inventory of the first course of steroids I took was:

7ml             PRIMABOLIN DEPOT
7ml             DECA 50 (NANDROLONE DECONOATE)
80 tablets    PRIMABOLIN ORALS

The main changes I noticed throughout the next few months was an increase in energy and my poundages for squats increased.  I also put on some weight, but nothing substantial.

I did have one frightening experience at home alone, as I injected myself, and feeling paranoid about getting embolism by not getting the air bubbles out right, and I began to feel faint as I injected.  I did faint on that occasion.  There is paradoxically kind of a rush you get from doing this sort of activity, and I’m sure it’s part of the curiosity that gets you taking them in the first place.

The second course I took facilitated the first real noticeable gains I had experienced in a year, and this course started in June 1990 and ended in August 1990.

I took:

10ml           DECA 50 (NANDROLONE DECONOATE)
10ml           TESTOSTERONE CYPIONATE (TESTOSTERONE DEPOT)
100 tablets   PRIMABOLIN ORALS

During this period, I increased my squats, front squats, leg presses, bent over rows and deadlifts.  My squat at 160 kg for five reps went to 180 kg for 10 reps in two months.  I could squat over 220 kg for a single deep rep.  My deadlift went from 140 kg for eight reps to 180 kg for eight reps, with a maximum single rep of 227 kg.  I bench pressed 150 kg.  I could front squat 160 kg for 12 reps and found that easily turned heads in the gym because it’s a hard movement to do with that amount of weight.  I used to do these exercises with the strictest form as I was trained under the gym owner, a former national champion power lifter.

I trained during this period with a bloke called Richard who is 6 foot 4 inches and of comparative build to me who was a chef in a French restaurant in West Perth.  We were both supplied steroids from the same source and would often help each other administer doses, because we are both quite new to it.

One thing that was bound to happen eventually was that I began to overtrain, which just means I was training too hard and too regularly and wasn’t giving myself the recovery time I needed.  Added to the steroids were anti-inflammatories to try and relieve the pain from the tendonitis I was getting in my lower lumbar spine.  The trouble was I wasn’t disciplined enough to stop the heavy weights, well, not until I got really sore. I learned the hard way.

My third course, which started in January 1991 and ended in March, consisted of:

10ml           DECA 50 (NANDROLONE DECONOATE)
10ml           BOLDEC (BOLDENONE)
10ml           TESTOSTERONE CYPIONATE (TESTOSTERONE DEPOT)
100 tablets   PRIMABOLIN DEPOT ORALS

Although I knew what I was doing was wrong, it was acceptable to me at the time because Mal, the gym owner, advocated it.  He would say, “At your stage Steve, you need an edge.  Being natural has its limitations.”  Being a mentor of mine, and the man I trained with every Saturday morning, I felt led to trust his judgement and go against my own reticence, because I had told myself that that second course would be my last.  I was married by then, and we were planning to start a family.  Mal wore me down, because I’d committed to representing the gym in a State bodybuilding competition.  I paid about $200 for the drugs, receiving them from Mal’s hand in the gym office.  One of the drugs (Boldec) was a horse steroid.  Not only was I paranoid about causing genetic issues in having children, but I was also paranoid about getting caught.  And to think that my eldest daughter was only conceived about eight months after I stopped taking them caused me no end of anxiety for years.  I can only thank God, that to this day, I haven’t had to deal with any adverse effects either from myself or from my kids.  It’s only now as I reflect I see, without making excuses, that I was manipulated.  But again, as there’s nothing new under the sun, you spend your life around certain things and they become you.

Yes, there is nothing new under the sun.  I recognise the folly of a man in his early 20s, and I understand that it takes years of adulthood for many of us to finally mature.  I recognise some things in my fifties that I had little appreciation of ten years ago.  I also know that the 1990s were a completely different time to the 2020s.  It seemed more normal than you can imagine today for people weight training to take anabolic steroids.

One question you might have is, what were the side-effects. Well, on the third course I took, I definitely experienced roid rage, I say to my shame now.  When my mother interacted with what I wrote 22 years ago, she believed I had little insight as to the effect of my moods on others—and especially my wife—at that time.  I’m glad Mum was brutally honest.  Only as I read now, having not picked this book up much in the past twenty years, do I get the feeling of how I resembled back then what I’ve grown to advocate against.

Yet, if there’s hope for me, and I did change, through the grace of God and a program of recovery, there’s got to be hope for anyone prepared to turn their life around—and let’s face it, if not for the grace of God go I... the end of my first marriage was the catalyst for change; I didn’t turn my life around, God did.  Some may wonder if my testicles shrank—no, they didn’t.  But the impact of these substances on my mental health was obvious.

And I guess that’s the main point I want to make.  I’d only just married and the most important thing to me was bodybuilding.  Getting a body I could walk onto stage with cost others so much and I never knew it at the time.  And yet, all through my life, if I’m honest, the issue of body image has never left me; a thorn in my side as the apostle Paul would say.  I’m glad my life took a different turn and I only ever competed once at bodybuilding.

This has been a long article.  I’m just glad I get to share how foolish I was, which is a reminder to me of the grace that has been extended to me by not only God but by others who loved me despite me being me.