Delays

For a while I lived in Cleveland in a warehouse with a rooster. What a bastard he was in the morning. So loud!

Well a few people have been asking me why I haven’t been writing lately. I wasn’t sure myself for a while, but now I think its because I haven’t been able to ride a whole lot lately. For some reason it doesn’t seem like very much fun to blog on a BMX site if I’m not riding BMX. I haven’t been riding a whole lot because of my chronic back problems. Its been a real trouble for me for the last 4 or 5 years. For a while it went away and maybe I solved the original problem, or maybe it was just hidden. It did seem like I overcame things for a year or two, but anyway it came to a peak for me yesterday and is bothering more then ever. It got so bad that I asked Odyssey to stop paying me since I don’t feel like I can ride or produce anything for them. Team manager Jim Bauer denied me though and told me they would stick it out and still wanted to support me.

I represented Odyssey to the best of my ability in Cleveland’s bike polo games. I’m pretty awful at it, but it was really a very big lot of fun!

Maybe back in february when I did that Odd Couple video contest at Ray’s is the last time I felt really good on my bike. After that contest I was pretty beat up and that seemed fair since I had ridden really hard and crashed a lot. I don’t have a problem being sore after I’ve been pushing myself. But, as usual lately, my lower back kept giving me problems. It feels like the muscles just won’t fire and in order to ride I catch myself getting into weird positions to compensate. It mostly always hurts or flat out gives up on me when I’m pulling up. I can ride more or less like normal, pumping on ramps isn’t too much of a problem anyway, but I can’t really bunny hop or go very high. I’ve noticed that since this back thing popped up I tend to go as low as I can on box jumps or jumps. If I pull too hard my back will scream at me and I will be out for a week or two. I tend to kind of save those few going high pulls I get a month for special occasions. Seems silly to me since going high has always been about the only thing that ever really mattered to me on a bike.

Nina got some free tickets to an Indian’s game. It was pretty fun to watch baseball in the stadium, despite how boring it looks on TV.

I’ve been in Cleveland for the last month and I got a gym membership to work on rehabing my back. 5 or 6 days a week in the gym working really hard and doing every exercise I’ve learned for core strength and I felt stronger and in better shape then I have in years. I got back to Austin for a couple week visit and after 10 minutes of riding in a ditch down the street my back was screwed. Odyssey really needed a photo of me for an ad so a couple days later I took a handful of advil, got Sandy Carson to bring a camera and tried to get a photo done. Everytime I hit the lip of a nice hip I found I got a bright white shot of pain radiatiing from my lower back and curse word would shoot out of my mouth. It would momentairly erase my focus and I would have to figure out in the few milliseconds of airtime that I had what I was doing and try to continue on trying to get a trick done well enough for Sandy to get a photo. 20 minutes or so of shooting and I had some decent table top shots and nothing else. I had to stop because the last 10 or so hits had been so painful I could barely even find how to land, let alone do anything worth photographing.

I spent half the game watching this dude eat a world record amount of peanuts.

Well anyway, I clearly need to do something about it. At the moment I can barely tie my shoes or bend at all. Its been on and off again for years now, and I think I can admit that no amount of rehabbing is going to entirely fix this. I’ve spent time with chiropractors, bought the stupid thing you hang upside down by your feet with, stretched, heated and iced all I can. I have had MRI’s done of course and I more or less crushed a couple discs in my lower back. The really confusing part is that one doctor told me that I would never be able to ride unless I got a spine fusing surgery, another doctor told me I would be fine just through conditioning, and another doctor told me never to get the surgery and it would be the worst thing I could ever do. All the same inconsistencies pop up when I ask people who’ve had back problems what they did. It leaves me feeling really unsure of what to do. Today I pulled up back specialists online and saw that it seems like most of them have their specialized fields as well. Like the doctors are usually a spinal surgeon, or a decompression specialist or rehab specialist. I feel like I would pretty much be self diagnosing myself if I pick one of these specialists. As in, I can bet what course of action the Spinal Surgeon will take with my back you know?

Lil’ Monty had a good time watching the bike polo. Laughing his little head off it seems to me.

Well, anyway, tomorrow I am going to start my search for a solution in earnest. I was thinking since I’ve been in a writing drought I would document it here on the blog is well. Maybe it’ll be funny or interesting in some way, or at least informative possibly? We’ll see and hopefully I can figure this out. Ok, first thing I need to do is call my insurance co and figure out what I’m covered for and how. Then find some doctors with some good reviews and then get going on trying to repair myself.