It’s been a hell of a year, yet as I pedaled joyously through the woods this morning, all the learning to walk, stitches, shingles, MRSA and unused pow-days faded into the past tense. My legs have finally forgiven me all the scalpels, not to mention three years of overtraining; today I was just so happy to be riding my bike.
to basics. Knee? Meet rock.
LOTR? read. Five pull-up goal? Accomplished. Mugbowls? Now the homes of four young cacti. True, my attempts at bread still turn out bricklike and yeasty, but I’m finally starting to creak back into motion; body mind and spirit.
And I forgot to add one item to my list of things you can do when your knees are healing. No, it doesn’t have to do with alcohol or drugs stronger than Ibuprofin. I’m talking about swimming! It’s something my PT’s and PA’s and MD’s and pretty much everyone have always suggested for me and something which I have always scoffed at because I am not, and have never been, a swimmer.
In fact, when I got sick of moping and finally gave it a try a few weeks ago I almost died 
trying to finish one length of the pool. It started out fine enough with much enthusiastic splashing and some (slow) progress, but then I found my arms had turned suddenly to lead, and I was in the deep end, and I couldn’t breathe as much as I wanted to, and then water was getting up my nose…when I finally reached the wall I clung to it, feeling exactly how I imagine cats feel when in pools.
Unlike a cat, I struggled through a few more lengths with the aid of various pool toys, and when I finally dragged myself out of the water twenty minutes later I felt something familiar and amazing- I was exhausted.
I immediately made it my goal to swim a mile, which is a sad indicator of the way my brain works; give me something difficult or potentially life threatening, and I will vow to master it. Ideally within six weeks, which is about the limit of my attention span.
To start I assigned myself ten warmup laps with pool toys, and then as many unaided laps as I could handle (without drowning) after that. At first I could do three. Then I did five. Eventually I was doing ten. I started “swimming” three days a week.
As always, being an absolute noob is fun- I literally have no idea what I’m doing, and when people ask me questions like: “do you want to circle swim?” I have to shake my head like I don’t understand English. I don’t know how to do those flippy things at the end of the pool, my goggle gave me a temporary black eye, and I even had to ask someone how to put a swim cap on the other day. Hint: you can fold your earlobes over your ear holes inside the cap so water doesn’t get in- genius!
Mostly I just try to focus on not splashing everyone around me. Because that shit is the WORST.
Then came the day (yesterday) when I swam fourty laps, which is just a bit over a mile in
the school pool. True, I stopped after almost every lap to catch my breath, and true, I used pool toys for some of it, but all in all I covered a mile of water distance by the end of my
“workout” and for that I am pretty damn proud of myself.
Sometimes you don’t have to be marching in the opening ceremonies- it’s your ability to keep making ridiculous goals that counts.
I really hate driving past oil refineries and huge swaths of salinated land- and it’s reflected in the locations of both of my speeding tickets to date. (no, I totally don’t almost cry every time I get pulled over.) Really though, despite my brushes with the law, in my mind Wyoming has always been like a dentist appointment; something to get through as quickly as possible.
But then one day (last week) I happened to stray from I25, and lo and behold- there are all sorts of rad things in Wyoming that you just don’t see from the highway! With a bunch of places with cool names like Splitrock and Tensleep out there, I discovered that Wyoming is nowhere near as useless of a state as I once thought. So from now on I’m bringing a tent and taking the long way home… it’s worth it.
Every time I’ve been hurt, my mom tells me it’s a good chance to do something I don’t always get to when I’m in training. It’s almost a year now since I’ve “trained” but I think the advice still holds true- injury is a time for reflection and weird new activities.
I know that everyone who goes through this one inevitably hits a point where they realize the reality of half a year without their activity of choice- it just sucks. So this is my list of ten other goals and activities, for anyone who’s also been, or currently is, stuck on the couch.
(This is also a good explanation for why I haven’t been writing any blogs lately.)
MY ACL TO DO LIST
There are days when I honestly can’t see the point of getting out of bed, but then I remember I have to trim the asymmetrical mugbowl I made, or that I have to buy avocados to do unnatural things with. In case you’re wondering- an asymmetrical mugbowl is something too tall to be a bowl but too wide to be a mug, usually with a disconcerting sort of lean to it. They’re kind of my specialty.
I used to think that the worst thing that could happen to me was another knee surgery, which was melodramatic but kind of true. In terms of life trials, this injury’s been mine. (I’m really lucky.) Yet I’ve found that the ol’ popped ligament always comes at a critical juncture in my life, and at times when I really, truly do need to take a step back and reassess my direction. So here we go. And maybe Aragorn can lend some words of wisdom. If not, he sure looks pretty in the movies.
When I last reconstructed my knee in 2006, I was fresh off a previous injury and furious over the loss of two back-to-back seasons. I went into surgery sad, rehabbed in anger, and came back to sports scared; my knee had nothing but bad energy going into it from day one.
Of course, bad energy can’t stay in you for too long. I postponed it for five years, but the release finally came last week; a small drop starved for snow and the bones of my leg slipped over each other in that sickening, familiar way. I curled into the slope and screamed out everything; all the anger, fear, and pain left in that joint. Then I skied down and called Alpine Orthopedics.
Now I have no visible kneecap, three fresh scars and a burly new ACL. My fourth, including the one I was born with. I spent my first lucid day indoors yesterday while my friends flocked to the new snow, and felt once again like some kind of crazed, trapped animal.
But, I don’t feel anger. I don’t feel fear. I feel sad for the lost potential of the next six months, but I’m already creating other things to get excited about. Above all I’m focused on simply pouring as much love into this new joint as I can.
Oh, and hey, I might just give that “biking” sport a try.
photos by CJ Carter
I’ve lived in Montana, more or less, for five years now. I’ve loved it and hated it, left and come back- always I come back. I’ve seen a fair bit of it, and whether I’m getting personal with the geology or just passing through, I like to think I’m building a pretty good idea of what this place is about. 
But then there’s always a new bend in the road.
It was the first day of the year, and we drove and drove, passing by ranches and grain silos, stranded-looking cows and battered-looking signs. Just a few hours in a new direction and we found wide horizons and small towns; it was amazing how quickly our music began to sound out of place.
After a while we climbed a pass in search of snow, but we coasted down the other side, still filling couloirs with our imaginations. The terrain was there; the deep pow of our dreams, unfortunately, was not.
Somewhat desperate, we framed a summit with the windshield and decided to get there, pulling over next to some sort of warehouse just outside the town of Neihart, home of Bob’s, the only source of food after 7PM for 45 miles around. A sign outside read “smile dammit, we have wifi!” (but further investigation revealed that they didn’t really.)
Clad in our silly, colorful plastic boots and softshell clothing, we unloaded not haybales or machinery but skis, those subtle, strange, joyous planks, from the back of a car that was otherwise useless by local standards in that it simply could not haul any kind of trailer. As truck after gristled truck rumbled by, I clicked the tab of my toepiece up, grabbed my poles and 
tried to shake the feeling of opposing realities.
Yet the edge was never far away as we skinned through what was likely someone’s backyard- an old mining road had once been cut into the slope, and the occasional tailing pile punctuated sunsoaked woods. On a ridge at the end of the road we found a deep hole in the hillside and an old cabin, battered yet sturdy; this was not the pristine backcountry environment I’ve gotten used to enjoying. This was once someone’s life.
We climbed on, searching for a summit as the snow thinned and the trees began to look more and more tortured. The wind howled as the sun began to sink, illuminating the low clouds and bathing the prairie in pink. We reached a top, took a breath, ate some licorice and soaked up the view. Then we turned around. 
To say the least, it was a sharky descent from the ridge; the snow was sun crusted, wind buffeted, and shallow. Rocks lurked everywhere, sometimes throwing sparks off our skis in the failing light, and we found that the road, which had been a pleasure to skin up, had became a nice crusty luge for the way down. The snow had an alarming habit of pitching skis and bodies forcefully towards the woods at the slightest chance, so we became very aggressive snow-plowers.
And it was just as our thighs began screaming their loudest that it ended- the luge terminated abruptly, depositing us unceremoniously in a dirty snowbank on the side of the highway. I can only imagine how our headlamps must have looked from the inside of one of those gristled trucks, winking and bobbing our way back into town.
Sometimes simply passing through a space is enough to earn a little perspective, but other times you have to leave the road, gain some altitude, and have an honest look around, in whatever way you know how. Sometimes you don’t see much, and sometimes the return trip’s pretty crappy, but somehow it’s still, weirdly, worth it.
A new years eve trek with KT and future shred pup, Stella.
