Fort Collins Trip

Last night I was sitting at the bar talking to Andy, who over the last few years has become a valued good friend, about the challenges I've been facing with riding. If I try to go any distance there are neck and back muscles that will spasm so painfully that for moments I go blind. The muscles will lock but I won't notice until I try to move my head at which point I'm greeted with a searing 10 out of 10 unbearable lightning strike of pain that interrupts my vision and overwhelms my being and makes being on the bike dangerous.

"Pain is not much a of deterrent for you, is it?" she had once asked. I thought it was a compliment at the time but have grown to understand that it was not. Pain is a signal. It informs. However, most of us who know pain for too long adapt and our baseline changes and we no longer notice pain in the same way. When it is not severe enough, it no longer informs. It gets lost in the noise. As a result, we do not take it into account. We don't pay attention to the signal. We do not adjust especially in those cases where a simple adjustment or change in behavior could make the signal stop. "Pain is weakness leaving the body." is one of those military slogans one hears. 

But there is pain that comes from weakness, weak muscles straining under a load, and a different pain that informs of structural problems that can lead to malfunction and disability. The problem with those who have become too comfortable with pain is they are no longer able to differentiate between the two. 

"I hurt. Pain is a thing of the mind. The mind can be controlled." to paraphrase Spock. 

A guy at the bar who had been listening in on the conversation chimed in, "Getting old sucks."

This has been a frequent refrain of late. More than one person has mentioned to me that maybe I am too old to be doing the things that I do. "You are no longer a young man." they will say. 

For quite a while now I've had a hypothesis. Maybe it is not being old that's the problem. Maybe because of having lived for longer and having developed certain habits over a longer period, the cumulative effect of those habits is the actual problem, not the "being old". Time since last movement in a particular way, not time being alive.

In a "state of nature" we would move much more than we do in this modern world. We would use the full range of  our musculature on a daily basis. But now, especially for us knowledge workers, we spend our days sitting hunched over machines or phones, our necks bent forward, slouching, and otherwise not using the full range of our joints and muscles. Slowly muscles get weak, other muscles get tight, the skeleton gets pulled out of alignment, and when it gets bad enough nerves start getting pushed against and Bad Things Happen(tm).

So maybe it's not being "old". Maybe it's just "time since last mobility". 

And then I realize it's been a couple of years since Duncan and I rode. We used to ride almost every weekend. At our height we would click off nearly 500 miles on a day ride, on a few occasions doing nearly 1000 miles in a weekend. But as his cancer became more a problem, he was no longer able to ride as far and then for the last two years not at all. Breaks my heart. Out of guilt and missing my friend, I wouldn't ride either. The bikes sat. We focused on doing things we could do together which turned out to be the sailboat, physical in its own right but not nearly the frequency.  I only got him out on the boat maybe 6 times if that. Guts me. I tell non-riders that motorcycling is strangely physical. After a long ride I'll often be sore. Not riding is not good for me. 

I was in the North Atlantic on a sailboat in a squall where, freezing and tight, I fell down some stairs while the boat was pitching. My arm got stuck on the handrail as the rest of my body went down. My right shoulder was not ok for some years afterwards. After it didn't improve for longer than I should have waited, I went to physical therapy and they worked on me a bit,  and gave me some exercises but I didn't gain any deeper understanding as to why they were prescribing the given exercises or what they suspected was the underlying problem.. The thing that struck me the most and that I had to adapt to was that the exercises were too easy. 1 pound weights. "If it hurts even the slightest bit, stop."  Wait, what?

Putting my ego aside is fairly easy for me so I did as I was told and I found myself amazed at how much even smallest effort could improve things. Also, it became clear to me that I was ignoring little signals, twinges of pain, that could have informed me of bigger problems to come. 

So did these exercises, but of course, once the pain wasn't there any more, I stopped. It's what humans do. 

And as one can predict, the problems recurred. I went on a 2000 mile earlier this year and things were sort of ok until they were not. It got so bad it took me most of a week to go 500 miles. 

So out of curiosity and with a desire to learn more about the reasons behind given recommendations, I've been following a few doctors of physical therapy on Instagram and that has provided me, over time, with a much better understanding. 

Did I do anything with this understanding? Did I actually put in the effort? 

No, of course not. 

A couple weeks ago, after a short 200 mile ride where I was in serious pain again I realized if I can't address this I'm not going to make it on my upcoming Colorado trip. I pondered not riding out. Facing that level of pain made me dread it and I wondered if maybe my days of long distance motorcycling were over. 

Then I remember this is not the first time that I've faced something like this. Back in the late 90's at the height of my illness, my joints hurt so much, I just didn't ride. There were several years there where I hardly rode at all. My mom would try to get me to give up motorcycling completely. Then I discovered The Diet to address my auto-immune disorder and I found I was able to ride again. Not too many years after that I went on my longest trip, 15,600 miles to Deadhorse, Alaska and back. 

So as a harbinger of doom, my back locked up on me during my day to day life. I was sitting at the bar talking to Andy about it realizing that if I was hurting that much just in my day to day life sitting there talking to Any, things on the road were not going to go well. 

So I decided to "just do". I had a list of physical therapy exercises designed to address my issues, at least as far as I understood them, but I knew that I had not given them the full attention they required in previous attempts. So each morning now I go through the list. But it's not just enough to do a given exercise or stretch, I find I have to be curious about it and probe the muscle and joint. For example there's a scalene stretch where while sitting on a chair you grab the seat with one hand and stretch your neck in the opposite direction. So I've tried this many times and have found it useless.

However, approaching it differently, clearly the developers of this stretch have some reason for it, or so I imagine, maybe there's some small detail that I am not getting. So as I tilt my head to the side for the stretch I tried adjusting the angle forward and back just a few degrees and noted a difference in pain. I'd stop at a given pain point making certain I wasn't pulling too hard and wait. And interestingly, over days, I've noticed every so slight increases in range of motion. 

After four days of going through various neck, shoulder, and arm exercises, I was no longer in day to day pain. 

"I guess this is just what you're going to have to do for the rest of your life." Andy said. 

"I suppose so." I replied. 

The other day, he messaged me, "Have you done your exercises?". 

A good friend.

Sleep had been elusive for the last few days. My departure was delayed by 24 hours as I tried to get the bike and everything else ready for this trip. 

But at the crack of 14:30 I left. 

 

I needed to stop at Bob's BMW (now Bob's Motorcycles because they are now a Ducati dealership as well) for an oil filter. I figure I'll change the oil when I'm in New Mexico. It'll be due. 

I stood at the empty counter for a while when Drew walked up. It had been ages since I've seen him. I didn't recognize him at first since it has been so long. He offered his condolences about Duncan and we got to talking about bikes, injuries, lost friends. I felt the pull of the road but decided, no, these are the moments that matter. I hadn't known it but Drew had been in a horrible deer collision accident. A deer ran out in front of his bike as he was doing about 80 ... ouch. He told me that he had contacts across the country and if I needed anything to contact him. 

He talked about his best friend, Paul, who coincidentally sold me my bike back in 1992. 

I walked out to my bike when a guy walked up, Todd, who I did not know. I think he works in the service department. He asked if I had had the bike painted so I told him the story of the engine-ectomy and how Duncan was the driving for behind getting this bike back on the road. We talked for a bit about my trip and he suggested that I try tandem base jumping in Moab. "Ummm. No. That's like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane." Apparently, that's something he's done 1300 times. Damn. 

I told him that I was planning to ride South to Arizona and then New Mexico.

"A real adventurer!" he said. 

After much longer than I had intended, I hit the road. My plan to manage pain is to stop every 60 minutes, which is surprisingly challenging. The desire is to always go. Over the next hill. Through the next pass. Stopping always always always feels wrong. 

But honestly, it's in the stopping where the memories are made. 

I stopped at a rest stop on I70 and as if it couldn't get hit home more clearly, I was surrounded by half a dozen people morbidly overweight and so mobility constrained they were having trouble stepping up from the pavement to the sidewalk. The curb was higher than they could manage. I saw one guy spend a good five minutes trying to get back into his truck clearly in so much pain hardly able to walk. 

I pondered helping but I did not know how. 

There are an endless array of conditions people can have over which they can have precious little influence. And maybe these people were suffering from some of those. Without knowing their back stories there's no way of knowing, but there are probably a wider set of conditions that we do have at least some influence over. 

"Motion is medicine." they say. 

I decided to take a detour once I reached Breezewood and headed North instead of Northwest.

As I left the Sheetz parking lot the sun was perfectly aligned on the hill I approaching. It was blinding.

I'm in Altoona now. Weird town. 

The skies on the way up here were dramatic.

 

I rode 181 miles this afternoon, the majority of it interstate, a.k.a. SuperSlab. I haven't  been able to ride slab for that long in years now. My back, neck, shoulders hurt but they didn't lock up. 

From here I only have 431 miles to go to meet Jay in Michigan. I may have challenged him to a game of pool that I am sure to lose. 

"Why are you going to Michigan?"

"Pool"

"Makes sense".