On Friday, the Fitness Nerd gets filleted!

It's been an interesting two and a half years in my world.

Normally, I devote this blog to news, spews, and views, but every now and again, I throw down autobiographical style. Because of this, regular Nerd Herders know that I’m a divorced beach bum with 50% custody of the world’s awesomest 7-year-old. You also know that right after my divorce, a spinal injury I probably received playing high school football 20+ years ago presented itself. The right wing of my L5 vertebrae had snapped off and, probably because of the increased insane amount of exercise I was using as therapy and because of my skyrocketing stress levels, it decided to hurt. A lot.

It took about 20 months to sort it out. At about 18 months, my third physical therapist threw in the towel and my orthopod wanted to fuse my spine. Several hours of Googling later, I realized this would be a dicey choice at beast. I threw one, last Hail Mary pass to the East and contacted a highly recommended acupuncturist. He saved the day, not so much in the sense that he poked me with a bunch of needles, although that was great, but more because he recommended a form of therapeutic yoga called Viniyoga.

Viniyoga did two things. It worked a few muscle that my PTs just didn’t know how to work, particularly the stabilizer muscles in my lower back. It also gave me a 30-minute routine that was impossible to over-do.

Ya see, I’m one of those unfortunate souls who doesn’t know how to do things by half. Each PT I went to gave me an intense core program and advised me to do it daily. I think they do this expecting patients to do it 3-4 times a week, max. I did it daily and then some, not only trying to fix my back, but also feed my endorphin addiction. A woman who I dated briefly watched me do the workout one afternoon and commented, “Jesus! Are you trying to heal your back or break yourself in half?”

(And, yes I’m aware of the hypocrisy of making a living helping people eat right and exercise while I simultaneously ram myself into the ground.)


Anyway, it was impossible to overdo the gentle Viniyoga routine, so I designed a program where I’d torture myself on odd days with a hybrid of all the PT core work and nurture myself with yoga on even days. It worked. Within two months, I was able to break a 7-month surfing fast and resume more intense yoga practices which I’d given up over a year ago. Yay! I had my life back.

The problem is, for all my brilliance – and you all know how brilliant I can be – I’m also capable of impressive feats of dumbassery. I ignored the subtle lesson that the Viniyoga workouts were trying to teach me: that I needed to relax. Instead, I surfed, I biked, I swam, I yogaed. I also continued to work 12 hours a day, increasing my workload at Beachbody and taking every writing assignment that came my way, while simultaneously caring for my daughter, writing screenplays, and (because this wasn’t apparently enough work) going back to school to earn my masters in holistic nutrition. Meanwhile, I stopped reading for pleasure completely, rarely watched movies unless they were research, and drastically reduced my social schedule.

Sure, I took up meditating to help with stress, but 10 minutes of nightly Zen just didn’t make up for the vast amount of leisure I was forsaking.

My body completely melted down. In February of this year, my left elbow started killing me, so I overcompensated with my right arm and an old injury in my right shoulder went nuts. Then, my knee went funny. Then, when I was camping with my daughter one weekend, I pivoted at the waist to grab a lantern and my femur felt like it was going to pop out of the socket. Then my lower back started to hurt again. Then my left trap started locking up every morning.

Suddenly, surfing and yoga dropped out of the picture again, as did painting, cooking, slouching, sitting cross-legged or lifting things above my head. Walking also became a little tricky unless, oddly enough, I was barefoot on sand. So daily sand walks, while still slightly painful, kept me from going insane. (My theory is that while sand walking works your muscles, it’s low impact on your joints.)

After two cortisone shots, one round of prednisone, 3 MRIs, a comprehensive blood test, several conversations with my orthopod, PT, and acupuncturist, and enough xrays to allow me to construct an exact replica of my entire skeleton this coming Halloween, I received the following diagnosis:

• Tendonitis in my left elbow
• Bone spurs on the head of my left femur causing a femoroacetabular impingement (FAI)
• A hunk of cartilage about the size of a quarter missing from my right knee
• A degenerative disc in my neck
• Osteoarthritis in my right shoulder
• A labral tear in my right shoulder
• Tendonitis in my upper, right bicep
• The proud knowledge that I was putting the sons and daughters of all three of my medical professionals through college

Meanwhile, I became a freakishly regular patron at the doctor's office. While my orthopod was extremely sympathetic, he insisted that I should be proud of the fact that I was the first patient in the history of his practice to present some form of every major orthopedic malady simultaneously.

Another piece of the puzzle was that the knee and the dodgy right shoulder were old injuries. Equipped with this, my orthopod’s theory was that the bone spurs were causing an imbalance that, in turn, caused everything below the waist, including my back, to hurt. Meanwhile, the bad disc in my neck was causing old injuries upstairs to flare up and not allowing new injuries to heal.

I took this information to my physical therapist, who ignored the other symptoms and focused on the neck. I also reminded him that I was an “enthusiastic” exerciser and would therefore probably overdo any home therapy he assigned. That was two months ago. The neck and both tendonitises have abated, but the labral tear is still nagging me.

And, for the record, my home exercises are breathtakingly dull.

As for the lower half, there’s not much you can do for an FAI except shave the bone. You can try to manage the pain, but every time those little spurs bang against my hip, it’s wearing things down all the more, which will eventually lead to a full hip replacement. Even my acupuncturist, who’s also a licensed herbalist, reacted to the diagnosis by saying, “Dude, I’m sorry, but you really need to go under the knife for this one.”

Unlike a spinal fusion, the success rate is good – 85% to 90%. Also, I’m thin, fit, and young(ish), which brings those numbers well into the 90s. The downside is that I’m due for a couple highly immobile, painful weeks of recovery followed by a couple highly inactive months.

My surgery is tomorrow at noon. My dad has flown out from Atlanta to help me for a couple weeks and an astonishing array of beautiful women have fanned my ego by offering to bring me food. Sadly, they all categorically refused my request that they serve it in a naughty nurse uniform.

That said, if any of my readers have a white mini-dress and a spare tuna casserole, I’m not giving up hope completely. (Email me.)

As for the recovery, I’m not too stressed. I’ve been dealing with pain for a while now, so the idea of pain with a purpose is weirdly appealing. Furthermore, I’m doing a lot of projecting 4-6 months into the future, when I’m up and riding my board again. It’ll be just in time for the winter swell.

So why am I telling you this? Three reasons. First, I might not write next week and I wanted to explain why. Second, like all bloggers, I’m hideously narcissistic. Third, when my orthopod diagnosed me, he left a huge factor out that I wanted to share with you: stress.

My dad has a theory that the reason this happened is because I don’t eat red meat and therefore I’m missing “crucial enzymes.” My mom thinks it’s because I’m “too darn skinny.” It’s neither of these things. It’s because I don’t let up. Granted, many of the things I do, the intense exercise, the creative writing, the schooling, give me great pleasure. I think they better me as a person, but in addition to all the self-improvement, I need to take time to just enjoy myself the way I am now.

Last week, I was in Missouri visiting my sister’s family. I had an epiphany. I marveled at the way they watched TV, read books, played games, and did nothing, despite all being very busy people. At one point, my brother-in-law gave me a copy of Keith Richards’ recent autobiography and insisted I’d love it. I almost turned him down with a line I’ve used many time in the last couple years, that condescending chestnut, “I don’t have time to read for fun.”


Then I realized it was my dumbassery talking. I accepted the book. I’ve been reading it every night since and will continue to do so as I convalesce. Then, if Mick Jagger writes a tell-all, I’ll read that too. Hell, I might even read one from Charlie Watts.

So if you’re like me, take this as a cautionary tale. It’s cool to work hard. It’s cool to play hard. It’s cool to live hard. But if you want to keep doing those things into your twilight years, sometimes it’s equally as important to live easy.