That would be filed under "life events that mold you". People usually assume I fell off a landpseed bike. But I broke it about 13 years before I started racing, playing baseball with my kids in our front yard. Slid into home after a line drive into the neighbor's yard that had been preceded by a few too many beers. Hit a chuckhole that spiral broke the tibia and crumbled the fibula as I heard a snap and saw a red flash that momentarily blinded me.
Several hours in surgery, several days in the hospital, doc said it was the worst tib/fib repair he had ever worked on. Eileen was told I was in a rather touch and go state for a while with a possibility of stroking out from clots. I just remember hurt like I had never felt before and being woken up to have my blood pressure checked every f***ing time I had finally fallen asleep for a few minutes!
Took 9 weeks for the cast to come off, several weeks of PT, a few months to be able to walk without wanting to cry, and it was a couple years before I could jog again. After the first week home I couldn't stand the oxy and morphine they put me on and discovered martinis worked better. Focused on the business from my bed as distraction while recovering and we ended up having one of the best summers ever. Got into a bad pattern of two or three evening cocktails to kill the pain. Lesson eventually learned was you can kill yourself doing something completely mundane, so why not take a few calculated risks? If you can just as easily die falling down the stairs or slowly suffocating from lung cancer like my dear sweet brother, why not increase the odds of going out doing something you love? A few years later I quit drinking and bought a motorcycle to restore. A few after that built my first race bike and set my first record. 13 years later I still don't drink, we walk a couple miles every day, I've been 147 mph on a bike at Bonneville and we're shooting for a record at 172 mph in 2026.
Several hours in surgery, several days in the hospital, doc said it was the worst tib/fib repair he had ever worked on. Eileen was told I was in a rather touch and go state for a while with a possibility of stroking out from clots. I just remember hurt like I had never felt before and being woken up to have my blood pressure checked every f***ing time I had finally fallen asleep for a few minutes!
Took 9 weeks for the cast to come off, several weeks of PT, a few months to be able to walk without wanting to cry, and it was a couple years before I could jog again. After the first week home I couldn't stand the oxy and morphine they put me on and discovered martinis worked better. Focused on the business from my bed as distraction while recovering and we ended up having one of the best summers ever. Got into a bad pattern of two or three evening cocktails to kill the pain. Lesson eventually learned was you can kill yourself doing something completely mundane, so why not take a few calculated risks? If you can just as easily die falling down the stairs or slowly suffocating from lung cancer like my dear sweet brother, why not increase the odds of going out doing something you love? A few years later I quit drinking and bought a motorcycle to restore. A few after that built my first race bike and set my first record. 13 years later I still don't drink, we walk a couple miles every day, I've been 147 mph on a bike at Bonneville and we're shooting for a record at 172 mph in 2026.
