2017, the year I turned 40, was just one slam after the next.
Early 2017: I take a hard puck to the shin playing pond hockey and have a bone bruise right at my ski boot top that lasts until the end of ski season.
Ski hill friend decides we need some moguls at our little Michigan ski hill and pushes piles of ice into a rudimentary mogul field where the moguls are piles of ice chunks. I am in a position of having advocated for not grooming every single square inch of this place, and wanting to encourage things like mogul skiing and tree skiing, so I feel forced to be seen skiing these awful moguls for the good of the sport here...because I fear what management will think if they do this and nobody ever skis the moguls. I take many huge hits trying to ski lines in, shoveling and skiing, shoveling and skiing. Slam after slam.
Mid ski season
Eventually, I get into problems with patroller and operations guy over this mogul field....with them closing the run, with them having problems with me going into it with a shovel to remove ice chunks and shape stuff to make it skiable, etc. I take refuge driving to Mt. Bohemia twice a week. In raincrust and tight trees, I push my luck trying to be cool on camera and hit a group of trees harder than I've ever hit anything while skiing. Now I have huge bone bruises on both shins.
Late ski season
Buddy calls me and says he can sort out my pass at the local hill and he wants my help getting a mogul comp done for late season. I start going back into this mogul field with two huge shin bruises to get a comp line together and build kickers for this comp. It rains and freezes, nobody else is going to space monkey these comp lines and kickers. I feel pressure to do this well, and to represent mogul skiing at this place. I spend a week skiing rainfrozen ice zipper lines and hitting iffy air bumps into moguls. I take at least 20 hard wrecks. My wrists and thumbs are fucked, my shins are fucked, my knees and back are sore. Comp goes fun for everyone and I dnf slamming on the bottom air, the wear and tear from this week basically ends my ski season.
Mud season:
I decide this is the year I will begin mountain biking again, and I pick up a rigid 29er. All the trails are new to me and not really built to be ridden on a rigid fork. I have hard crashes and decide I need a susp fork.
Summer:
Susp fork makes me faster and gets me onto some DH trails. I build confidence and speed until I have the hardest slam I can remember (may have had harder, but those are ones that erase the memory with a concussion), folding the front wheel on the compression below a fast step-down. I lay on the ground for awhile, collect myself, stomp the wheel back to roll-able and ride home bleeding everywhere, in my underpants (shorts ripped in half), with one eye closed b/c of blurry fucked up vision. My wife is out of town, so my mom comes over to make sure my brain doesn't swell up and kill me lying at home. ugh.
Late summer I begin to focus on surfing.
Fall: we have a beautiful day of surf at the best spot in the area, but the word is out to the population centers in the south great lakes, and I count 40+ people in the water. Frustrated, a friend suggests "I guess we can just longboard (skateboard)". I realize another friend has left a longboard in my garage with some stuff he's storing. I begin longboarding with no real skateboarding background and take many small bails and one good one where I drag my face on the pavement and have to make my way home with a super bloody face.
I become hooked and start longboarding as often as I can. Eventually, it's a beautiful fall day and my wife is out riding her bike while I'm out doing bus laps with the longboard. I've had too much wine, we meet up and she's going to follow me on a lap with her bike. Everything is going great until a traffic pattern develops in front of me that I don't like, and I decide to foot brake with too much speed. I take a superman onto rough pavement at about 20-25mph and leave my right upper leg numb. It's still numb. My wife and a bystander are horrified, we hurry away before anybody calls 911.
Late fall, I've figured out how to take my dog on bike rides in a milk crate with a little harness. I take him to go get some groceries and I'm riding home with about 50 lbs of dog and food packed on the bike. It's almost ski season and I'm excited to build strength, so I decide to really power up this steep hill. I feel a muscle pull in my hip.
The next few months are miserable, as I feel this "muscle pull" pushing on a nerve and making sitting painful...which is a nightmare as a commercial driver.
Still, I was have so much fun longboarding that in my mind I've decided to make this small ski hill fun by learning to snowboard.
Early ski season: I run into more trouble with more operations and patrol guys at the little ski hill, with them telling me "anything not groomed is considered out of bounds here". I decide to stick to the snowboard. I flounder and slam, flounder and slam. My hip burns. My work sitting in a seat is horrendously painful. I continue snowboarding knowing I'll get better.
Eventually, I cave in and go to a doctor and physical therapist, who tell me it's not a muscle, it's a disc.
Thus ends the Year of Slams.
So now, I haven't been posting here because sitting in a chair hurts too much. I lay on the floor now. I'm taking some time off work to try to heal this disc, as was the plan with my PT. Snowboarding is out, which sucks because I was just getting to the point of not being gripped and being able to just relax and cruise on it. The only skiing I can do now is old man gentle cruising. Mt. Bohemia is out. I walk my dog, I play pickle ball with oldsters at the senior center. I lay on the floor.
Going to have to dial it back....I can't just keep abusing myself this way.
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