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This essay originally appeared at midliferider.com. If you're young, flexible, and indestructible, it's probably not your read. If you're middle aged and wondering why your body no longer works like it did when you were 20, read on . . .
“You might never be able to ride your sport bike again.”
You mean my brand new Aprilia RSV 1000 Factory? The one I just bought? The one with 600 miles on it? The bike of my dreams? Never again? It felt like a death sentence.
Maybe six months ago I began noticing pain in my right hand. I spoke to my doctor about it but he didn’t have much to say. He suggested that I change my office ergonomics to take some of the pressure off. I heard what he said, I watched his lips move, but in the back of my head I kept hearing the word “carpal tunnel syndrome.” Kind of scary.
So I bought a new mouse and a couple of spongy things to rest my wrists on and hoped for the best. For the past 50+ years ignoring these sorts of body signals had always worked well for me. Why should this be any different?
50+ years is a pretty long time to spend with someone or something and not know much about him, her, or it. But that’s the unvarnished truth about my relationship with my body. It sounds “woo woo” just typing those words. But it frames the issue accurately. I was in a relationship except we we’re using different bedrooms. Now I was beginning to think we should do lunch.
Growing up I remember going through the normal range of illnesses associated with the time: Measles, mumps, bumps, scrapes, colds, and the occasional sprain or broken bone. I hardly ever saw the inside of a doctor’s office and apparently suffered little for it. I played sports (a lot) including college basketball, ate (a lot), didn’t get much sleep, and generally went about the business of being a boy and then a young man with little thought and less attention to the various signals my body sent up along the way. My mantra was: clean it, rub it, wrap it, sleep on it, or ignore it. That pretty much took care of things for the better part of four decades.
As the years advanced I did begrudgingly take note of the fact that I could no longer run as fast, jump as high, or fall as hard without damage. My knees yelped and then screamed after a Saturday afternoon hooping it up on the blacktop. I learned the finer points of stretching before exertion. I discovered I didn’t digest milk all that well. I decided to cut some of the obvious baddies out of my diet.
But nowhere in there can I honestly say that I was truly paying attention to what my body was telling me unless the signals were so loud that even a guy would notice: Like spasing my lower back so badly I couldn’t stand up. I can proudly say that I noticed that. I can also say that long before the Chiropractor said I could, I was back doing the same back-unfriendly things just like before.
Hello, anybody home?
By the first of the year, about three months after I first started complaining about my mousing/throttle/writing/teeth brushing hand, I was in serious pain. The good news is that my hand no longer bothered me. The bad news was it was overwhelmed by the pain in my neck, shoulder, and arm. I would probably still be toughing it out except that I could no longer ride my sport bike. Now it was serious.
Just to refresh the visual here, the classic sport bike riding position is weight forward and feet tucked up. The proper way to execute this is to support your upper body with your core muscles. The wrong way to do it is to support your weight on your hands and wrists until the airflow takes over. In either case, your arms wind up extended and so does your neck. To get a sense of this, put your arms straight in the air and then look up. More. Then balance a dictionary on your forehead.
Therein lay the problem. By this time, I could barely extend my arm to grab a fork without pain. Tipping my head back generated waves of pain. Riding out to my favorite twisty one day, I thought I was going to faint. I kid you not when I say I turned back and rode straight to the Aprilia dealer to see about a Tuono. The only thing that held me back was that riding it wasn’t much better. Nobody said anything to me, but I thought later, “Typical, you’re in excruciating pain and your first impulse is to buy a different motorcycle.”
Getting After It
The first indications that I needed to change my “relationship” actually showed up from a different direction about the time my throttle hand started waving for help. After too many years of neglect, my wife talked me into going to a dentist. There’s a theme here. As I expected, my teeth were a bit the worse for it and would need two fillings and two crowns. Groan.
More alarming was my blood pressure. I have no idea why they took it but they took it three times to be sure. If the combined numbers were delegates, I’d be a legitimate vice presidential candidate. They were scary high. So I scurried on down to see a doctor—I’ve already covered off my aversion in that direction—where I was informed that it would be a capital idea if I would immediately start a regimen of both blood pressure and cholesterol drugs. Part of me thought it a badge of my growing maturity that I now required these talismans; part of me was truly alarmed that this contraption that had been spiriting me around so faithfully might no longer be fully fit for duty.
Rather than selling my bike I decided to look into an overhaul of my malfunctioning body. I started with massage therapy, which normally felt great but now left me sore and sorer. It was beginning to dawn on me that there might be something actually wrong. That I might actually have to take this seriously. That I might have to change something. In retrospect, it was right at this time that the journey really began.
One of the characteristics of great journeys is how the pieces show up and magically fit together as you go. Sometimes you can see it happening right in front of you. Sometimes you see it only from the perspective you gain as you go. Although the massage therapy wasn’t helping, the recommendation to a Chiropractor did.
Dr. Steve is younger than me, but tall and rangy like me. Better still, he used to ride sport bikes. Excellent. He is a proponent of something called the Koren Specific Technique. You can read about it yourself: it wasn’t what I thought I needed. But I was pretty desperate and willing to try anything. And you know what? Things began to change. I got worse. I got worse and I started to get scared. The pain was now a constant companion, and not a good one. I would stagger in to see Dr. Steve and beg him to give me a good rack-and-crack just to take some of the pressure off.
Steve recommended that I also begin nutritional therapy. So I did that too. Every time I saw him I went home with another bottle or two of things I couldn’t pronounce. In the space of a couple of weeks, I went from someone who viewed his body as something to hang clothes on so I could go do all the cool things I like to do, to a man obsessed with trying to get to know this companion of 51 years to whom I barely spoke.
Little by little I could feel things changing, but not fast enough for my tastes. I was thinking a week, maybe two and me and my body could go back to the way things were, starting with getting back on that sexy Italian parked under the cover in my garage. But you know how it is with a new relationship. Body had other ideas and was now far less shy about mentioning them.
Somewhere in here I decided it was time to get x-rays. It’s not necessarily the case any more that a Chiropractor uses old technology to get a view on what parts of your system are under stress. But there’s nothing like film to tell the story. So off I went to get radiated. It was not a pretty picture. I have degenerative arthritis in C 4, 5, and 6. The openings where the nerves exit and head to points south were closing up. I have spurring. I was now truly afraid.
I was also fully in the “I’ll try anything mode” so I relented and called my doctor. I nearly cried while laughing when the nice lady on the other end of the line said he was on maternity leave for six weeks. Six weeks felt like 600 years at that point. It was all I could do to blurt, “Gee, I didn’t realize he was pregnant.” It was insult upon injury. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry.
Finally, after half a dozen calls and ten days of trying I managed to get in to see a doctor who was covering for my on-leave MD. A lovely guy. He looked at my x-rays, prodded and poked, and then told me that there wasn’t much he could do and that I should keep doing what I was doing. He also suggested physical therapy. He also gave me some anti-inflammatory drugs. I took them for one day and had a massive reaction. Did I say I felt like crying?
With the addition of Physical Therapy, which is what came next, I was now seeing a shrink, a dentist (remember those caps?), a Chiro, a Nutritional Therapist, an MD, a Physical Therapist, and later an Acupuncturist. In some cases I was seeing these people twice a week. Do the math. I was with someone every day, or with all of them all day. Or all of the above.
And then something happened. It started with the PT. He looked me over and as kindly as possible told me what my mother had first started telling me 40 years ago. “Your posture sucks.” He didn’t use those words. He used much bigger, much more technical sounding words. But that’s the net of it.
“Your posture sucks and it has sucked for years. That’s why you’re having all these problems. So we’re going to have to rebuild your posture. It could take a very long time. And you may never be able to ride your sport bike again.”
And then magic happened. He gave me something I could do to help myself. It was like a lifeline. He gave me exercises. He explained muscles, bones, and nerves. He told me what was wrong, why it was hurting me, and what I needed to do. And suddenly it was all clear. All that hurting was my body trying to get my attention and I had been ignoring the signals. The feedback loop was broken and I broke it.
We’re all different in this way, but I’m a sled dog when it comes to a task. During the previous two months I had been an unwilling and unhappy passenger on a journey I was being forced to take. I did everything I could, but there was nothing I could really do. But now this. Stretching. Strengthening. Changing how I moved. Changing how I sat. Changing how I stood. I got “As” all through school and here was my chance to get and A in realigning my body. So I did about 400% more than the PT suggested.
And you know what? It worked. Within a week, my posture had begun to improve. No, it radically changed. All the people I was working with were stunned. Somewhere in there I think I finally made friends with my traveling companion. We began to have a dialog. My body had been talking all along but now I was listening.
By now the pain had now taken up residence in new places. As I continued to rebuild my posture and re-stack my spine, muscles that had been hanging around the street corner suddenly got back into the game. Hello there! Haven’t heard from you in awhile!
Each of the people I went to along the way had been suggested by the previous person. “You know, maybe you should go see . . .” The last piece of the puzzle was mine to find and fit. One day working with the PT, I blurted out, “What do you think about acupuncture?” My brother had told me that he was working with one and something about it seemed to call to me. The PT gave me some names but none of them seemed right. So I fired up Yahoo and searched until I found one. My lead criterion was as close to home as I could find. I just didn’t want to have to drive yet another place.
Katia was able to see me that day. I can’t say that I like needles even a little but as I’ve said, I was all in on this. Yet another set of questions. Yet another recitation of my story. She looked at my tongue, felt my pulse, made some strange looking notes, and then told me to strip. Alrighty then.
Half an hour later, I was doing my best porcupine imitation and fast asleep on the table. Walking out I felt strangely light, almost floating. The next day, I was pain free.
“So how was your weekend?”
“I rode my sport bike.”
“And???????”
“Friggin awesome.”
I’m not all the way there yet. I can still get the lateral nerve to light up if I try. The pain no longer bothers me. It is still there, but it isn’t screaming all the time. It doesn’t need to. I am paying attention.
The people I’m working with are stunned at the change in my body. My head now sits on top of my spine, or mostly it does, instead of leading the parade like it used to. I’m back doing yoga again. I’m working on the balance ball to build up my core muscles—great for any type of motorcycle riding. I’ve strengthened muscles that had just been along for the ride. I’ve lengthened my neck. I’ve increased my range of motion and my flexibility.
I mentioned the idea of journey and pieces fitting together. By now I really feel like I am on a journey. It’s clear the healing wasn’t the result of any one thing. It was all of them, each addressing a different need. I didn’t like it at the time, but I’m not surprised that things got worse to get better. Each of the people I worked and work with have been just great: loving, understanding, supportive, and professional. I really believe that each piece was important to the whole.
Most importantly, I am no longer afraid. I feel like I had been given a gift, a gift of understanding my traveling companion, a “welcome to the neighborhood” party for me and my body before it got too late in the game.
To bring it full circle, I’m back riding, both my FJR in the classic “sit up and beg” riding position, and my Aprilia, knee down and all the way hung off.
Whether you choose eastern or western, let me encourage you to meet and greet your number one traveling companion if you haven’t already done so. If you’re at all like me, clean it, rub it, wrap it, sleep on it, or ignore it just doesn’t get it done any more.
copyright 2008, midliferider.com
“You might never be able to ride your sport bike again.”
You mean my brand new Aprilia RSV 1000 Factory? The one I just bought? The one with 600 miles on it? The bike of my dreams? Never again? It felt like a death sentence.
Maybe six months ago I began noticing pain in my right hand. I spoke to my doctor about it but he didn’t have much to say. He suggested that I change my office ergonomics to take some of the pressure off. I heard what he said, I watched his lips move, but in the back of my head I kept hearing the word “carpal tunnel syndrome.” Kind of scary.
So I bought a new mouse and a couple of spongy things to rest my wrists on and hoped for the best. For the past 50+ years ignoring these sorts of body signals had always worked well for me. Why should this be any different?
50+ years is a pretty long time to spend with someone or something and not know much about him, her, or it. But that’s the unvarnished truth about my relationship with my body. It sounds “woo woo” just typing those words. But it frames the issue accurately. I was in a relationship except we we’re using different bedrooms. Now I was beginning to think we should do lunch.
Growing up I remember going through the normal range of illnesses associated with the time: Measles, mumps, bumps, scrapes, colds, and the occasional sprain or broken bone. I hardly ever saw the inside of a doctor’s office and apparently suffered little for it. I played sports (a lot) including college basketball, ate (a lot), didn’t get much sleep, and generally went about the business of being a boy and then a young man with little thought and less attention to the various signals my body sent up along the way. My mantra was: clean it, rub it, wrap it, sleep on it, or ignore it. That pretty much took care of things for the better part of four decades.
As the years advanced I did begrudgingly take note of the fact that I could no longer run as fast, jump as high, or fall as hard without damage. My knees yelped and then screamed after a Saturday afternoon hooping it up on the blacktop. I learned the finer points of stretching before exertion. I discovered I didn’t digest milk all that well. I decided to cut some of the obvious baddies out of my diet.
But nowhere in there can I honestly say that I was truly paying attention to what my body was telling me unless the signals were so loud that even a guy would notice: Like spasing my lower back so badly I couldn’t stand up. I can proudly say that I noticed that. I can also say that long before the Chiropractor said I could, I was back doing the same back-unfriendly things just like before.
Hello, anybody home?
By the first of the year, about three months after I first started complaining about my mousing/throttle/writing/teeth brushing hand, I was in serious pain. The good news is that my hand no longer bothered me. The bad news was it was overwhelmed by the pain in my neck, shoulder, and arm. I would probably still be toughing it out except that I could no longer ride my sport bike. Now it was serious.
Just to refresh the visual here, the classic sport bike riding position is weight forward and feet tucked up. The proper way to execute this is to support your upper body with your core muscles. The wrong way to do it is to support your weight on your hands and wrists until the airflow takes over. In either case, your arms wind up extended and so does your neck. To get a sense of this, put your arms straight in the air and then look up. More. Then balance a dictionary on your forehead.
Therein lay the problem. By this time, I could barely extend my arm to grab a fork without pain. Tipping my head back generated waves of pain. Riding out to my favorite twisty one day, I thought I was going to faint. I kid you not when I say I turned back and rode straight to the Aprilia dealer to see about a Tuono. The only thing that held me back was that riding it wasn’t much better. Nobody said anything to me, but I thought later, “Typical, you’re in excruciating pain and your first impulse is to buy a different motorcycle.”
Getting After It
The first indications that I needed to change my “relationship” actually showed up from a different direction about the time my throttle hand started waving for help. After too many years of neglect, my wife talked me into going to a dentist. There’s a theme here. As I expected, my teeth were a bit the worse for it and would need two fillings and two crowns. Groan.
More alarming was my blood pressure. I have no idea why they took it but they took it three times to be sure. If the combined numbers were delegates, I’d be a legitimate vice presidential candidate. They were scary high. So I scurried on down to see a doctor—I’ve already covered off my aversion in that direction—where I was informed that it would be a capital idea if I would immediately start a regimen of both blood pressure and cholesterol drugs. Part of me thought it a badge of my growing maturity that I now required these talismans; part of me was truly alarmed that this contraption that had been spiriting me around so faithfully might no longer be fully fit for duty.
Rather than selling my bike I decided to look into an overhaul of my malfunctioning body. I started with massage therapy, which normally felt great but now left me sore and sorer. It was beginning to dawn on me that there might be something actually wrong. That I might actually have to take this seriously. That I might have to change something. In retrospect, it was right at this time that the journey really began.
One of the characteristics of great journeys is how the pieces show up and magically fit together as you go. Sometimes you can see it happening right in front of you. Sometimes you see it only from the perspective you gain as you go. Although the massage therapy wasn’t helping, the recommendation to a Chiropractor did.
Dr. Steve is younger than me, but tall and rangy like me. Better still, he used to ride sport bikes. Excellent. He is a proponent of something called the Koren Specific Technique. You can read about it yourself: it wasn’t what I thought I needed. But I was pretty desperate and willing to try anything. And you know what? Things began to change. I got worse. I got worse and I started to get scared. The pain was now a constant companion, and not a good one. I would stagger in to see Dr. Steve and beg him to give me a good rack-and-crack just to take some of the pressure off.
Steve recommended that I also begin nutritional therapy. So I did that too. Every time I saw him I went home with another bottle or two of things I couldn’t pronounce. In the space of a couple of weeks, I went from someone who viewed his body as something to hang clothes on so I could go do all the cool things I like to do, to a man obsessed with trying to get to know this companion of 51 years to whom I barely spoke.
Little by little I could feel things changing, but not fast enough for my tastes. I was thinking a week, maybe two and me and my body could go back to the way things were, starting with getting back on that sexy Italian parked under the cover in my garage. But you know how it is with a new relationship. Body had other ideas and was now far less shy about mentioning them.
Somewhere in here I decided it was time to get x-rays. It’s not necessarily the case any more that a Chiropractor uses old technology to get a view on what parts of your system are under stress. But there’s nothing like film to tell the story. So off I went to get radiated. It was not a pretty picture. I have degenerative arthritis in C 4, 5, and 6. The openings where the nerves exit and head to points south were closing up. I have spurring. I was now truly afraid.
I was also fully in the “I’ll try anything mode” so I relented and called my doctor. I nearly cried while laughing when the nice lady on the other end of the line said he was on maternity leave for six weeks. Six weeks felt like 600 years at that point. It was all I could do to blurt, “Gee, I didn’t realize he was pregnant.” It was insult upon injury. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry.
Finally, after half a dozen calls and ten days of trying I managed to get in to see a doctor who was covering for my on-leave MD. A lovely guy. He looked at my x-rays, prodded and poked, and then told me that there wasn’t much he could do and that I should keep doing what I was doing. He also suggested physical therapy. He also gave me some anti-inflammatory drugs. I took them for one day and had a massive reaction. Did I say I felt like crying?
With the addition of Physical Therapy, which is what came next, I was now seeing a shrink, a dentist (remember those caps?), a Chiro, a Nutritional Therapist, an MD, a Physical Therapist, and later an Acupuncturist. In some cases I was seeing these people twice a week. Do the math. I was with someone every day, or with all of them all day. Or all of the above.
And then something happened. It started with the PT. He looked me over and as kindly as possible told me what my mother had first started telling me 40 years ago. “Your posture sucks.” He didn’t use those words. He used much bigger, much more technical sounding words. But that’s the net of it.
“Your posture sucks and it has sucked for years. That’s why you’re having all these problems. So we’re going to have to rebuild your posture. It could take a very long time. And you may never be able to ride your sport bike again.”
And then magic happened. He gave me something I could do to help myself. It was like a lifeline. He gave me exercises. He explained muscles, bones, and nerves. He told me what was wrong, why it was hurting me, and what I needed to do. And suddenly it was all clear. All that hurting was my body trying to get my attention and I had been ignoring the signals. The feedback loop was broken and I broke it.
We’re all different in this way, but I’m a sled dog when it comes to a task. During the previous two months I had been an unwilling and unhappy passenger on a journey I was being forced to take. I did everything I could, but there was nothing I could really do. But now this. Stretching. Strengthening. Changing how I moved. Changing how I sat. Changing how I stood. I got “As” all through school and here was my chance to get and A in realigning my body. So I did about 400% more than the PT suggested.
And you know what? It worked. Within a week, my posture had begun to improve. No, it radically changed. All the people I was working with were stunned. Somewhere in there I think I finally made friends with my traveling companion. We began to have a dialog. My body had been talking all along but now I was listening.
By now the pain had now taken up residence in new places. As I continued to rebuild my posture and re-stack my spine, muscles that had been hanging around the street corner suddenly got back into the game. Hello there! Haven’t heard from you in awhile!
Each of the people I went to along the way had been suggested by the previous person. “You know, maybe you should go see . . .” The last piece of the puzzle was mine to find and fit. One day working with the PT, I blurted out, “What do you think about acupuncture?” My brother had told me that he was working with one and something about it seemed to call to me. The PT gave me some names but none of them seemed right. So I fired up Yahoo and searched until I found one. My lead criterion was as close to home as I could find. I just didn’t want to have to drive yet another place.
Katia was able to see me that day. I can’t say that I like needles even a little but as I’ve said, I was all in on this. Yet another set of questions. Yet another recitation of my story. She looked at my tongue, felt my pulse, made some strange looking notes, and then told me to strip. Alrighty then.
Half an hour later, I was doing my best porcupine imitation and fast asleep on the table. Walking out I felt strangely light, almost floating. The next day, I was pain free.
“So how was your weekend?”
“I rode my sport bike.”
“And???????”
“Friggin awesome.”
I’m not all the way there yet. I can still get the lateral nerve to light up if I try. The pain no longer bothers me. It is still there, but it isn’t screaming all the time. It doesn’t need to. I am paying attention.
The people I’m working with are stunned at the change in my body. My head now sits on top of my spine, or mostly it does, instead of leading the parade like it used to. I’m back doing yoga again. I’m working on the balance ball to build up my core muscles—great for any type of motorcycle riding. I’ve strengthened muscles that had just been along for the ride. I’ve lengthened my neck. I’ve increased my range of motion and my flexibility.
I mentioned the idea of journey and pieces fitting together. By now I really feel like I am on a journey. It’s clear the healing wasn’t the result of any one thing. It was all of them, each addressing a different need. I didn’t like it at the time, but I’m not surprised that things got worse to get better. Each of the people I worked and work with have been just great: loving, understanding, supportive, and professional. I really believe that each piece was important to the whole.
Most importantly, I am no longer afraid. I feel like I had been given a gift, a gift of understanding my traveling companion, a “welcome to the neighborhood” party for me and my body before it got too late in the game.
To bring it full circle, I’m back riding, both my FJR in the classic “sit up and beg” riding position, and my Aprilia, knee down and all the way hung off.
Whether you choose eastern or western, let me encourage you to meet and greet your number one traveling companion if you haven’t already done so. If you’re at all like me, clean it, rub it, wrap it, sleep on it, or ignore it just doesn’t get it done any more.
copyright 2008, midliferider.com
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