When CrossFit’s “General Physical Preparedness” Means Something More: Jessica Welch’s Recovery Story
Jessica and Eddy Welch have lived their best lives outside Billings, MT, for several years.
The two discovered CrossFit about five years ago, right after Jessica gave birth to their second son. They were hooked instantly.
- “It was this whole outlook on fitness that wasn’t based on how you look or how much you weighed,” Jessica told the Morning Chalk Up in an interview. “It was just what you could do with your body. So I drank the Kool-Aid, became a coach, and started wanting to compete in the sport.”
Jessica started doing private fitness and nutrition coaching, and things were going well … until they weren’t. During the 2022 CrossFit Open, Jessica was doing Workout 22.3, a workout with several movements, including bar muscle-ups and thrusters.
She remembers exactly when things started to feel off — she failed a bar muscle-up and thought maybe she had injured her ribs.
- “After that, I had ongoing rib pain for about a year and a half,” she said. “I couldn’t figure out what it was. I was going to my chiropractor and physical therapist, who both do CrossFit. My chiropractor suggested I get an MRI and X-rays.”
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Identifying the Problem
Doctors thought that Jessica had separated or fractured her rib, but the two X-rays she had showed nothing. Her blood work also looked great, and her doctors kept saying she was healthy.
Everything came back normal. But Jessica knew something was wrong.
- “I wasn’t sleeping,” she said. “I could only lie down for 20 minutes at a time, so I was just up all night. That is when we finally did the MRI and when the tumor showed up. It was completely compressing my spinal cord because it was inside the bones of my spine.”
Once they identified the tumor, Welch’s doctors acted quickly. The medical team feared that if Welch were to fall or have some other sort of accident, the tumor could compress her spinal cord completely and paralyze her.
The tumor had to come out, and it needed to be done soon.
- “They were confident they could operate on it, but they weren’t sure exactly what the operation would entail until they got in there,” she remembers. “They didn’t know if it was cancer, and they gave us options of what could happen depending on what kind of tumor it was and what it was attached to.”
There was so much unknown about the surgery — if the tumor was attached to bone, the doctors would have to remove part of that bone. The same could be said if it was attached to her lung or another organ. Doctors also told her that they might have to do a full fusion of her back, and she could wake up with neurological deficits.
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Fixing the Problem
It was a lot to handle for the 34-year-old, and her husband, Eddy, knew he had to be her support.
- “We had a conversation where we just kind of faced the music and prayed,” Eddy told the Morning Chalk Up. “And then we decided that up until the surgery time, she was going to train as hard as possible so that she could be ready to recover. Hopefully, she could try to stash that health in a savings account, if you will.”
The couple approached it like they would approach their daily 7 a.m. workout. Relying on years of building mental and physical toughness and, in CrossFit terminology, “general physical preparedness.”
- “It sounds cheesy,” Jessica laughed, “but in my mind, I tried to approach it like training. Every week, I push my body to its limits, recover from it, and do it again. So I just tried to tell myself I had trained for this.”
She remembers thinking she had been training to compete in CrossFit, “but I was training for something bigger.”
- “I remember us being so thankful for the health and fitness I already had going in because it is even harder if you’re going into something like that with a deficit already.”
Furthermore, Welch’s CrossFit training made her neurosurgeon incredibly positive for her prognosis.
- “He said most of his patients are in their 50s and 60s, and their bones are brittle, and they already struggle with certain things heading into surgery,” Eddy said.
The medical team expected her to have more symptoms and complications with the tumor, but they found that her muscles were so strong that they were pushing against it and keeping it at bay.
Surgery day was June 19, 2023, one year ago. And Jessica was ready.
When they called her name, she said that she stood up and sprinted to the surgical prep room.
- “I think that’s a good CrossFit mentality, she said. “I wasn’t dragging my feet. I remember waking up and being so happy that I could wiggle my toes and feel everything. The surgery went as well as it possibly could.”
The Aftermath
Eddy is in awe of his wife. He beams when he talks about her and the way she has faced this episode.
- “She attacks things,” he said. “The way she attacked this is the way she attacks everything, with a lot of intensity and focus and drive.”
Jessica started physical therapy after six weeks, and it was a slow and steady process, which was expected.
After general physical therapy, she began to move back to CrossFit, heavily scaling the workouts. She got much more out of the process than she ever thought.
- Jessica remembers how it felt to scale: “I scaled even more than the typical amount, and I learned more about scaling variations. For instance, I had to be able to do a lat pulldown with body weight before I could do ring rows. Then, I would progress to strict pull-ups before I added in kipping. And then I would go to chest-to-bars before I would try muscle ups.”
It is now been 12 months since her surgery, and Jessica is feeling great. She has incorporated almost every CrossFit movement back into her repertoire.
And while she isn’t lifting as heavy as she wants yet, she knows she’s putting in the work to do so soon.
Featured image: @iamjessicawelch / Instagram