Hero to zero, my three day journey…

My injury from the cycling accident with the car was called an AC-Separation. From Wikipedia, it is defined as a Type III AC-Separation which means multiple ligaments are torn that connects the clavicle (collar bone) to the top of the shoulder. A significant bump is formed by the lateral end of the clavicle being detached and pushing up against the shoulder muscles and skin. Without surgery this protrusion is permanent along with the potential for loss of motion in the shoulder however the ligaments do eventially reattach.

Here is an x-ray of my left shoulder showing the injury 45 minutes after the accident. Leading up to the surgery, which was 3 weeks after the accident, I actually recovered significantly. 2 weeks afterward, I was back to commuting to work and some running. My weekend before the surgery on Monday went like this:

Day 1 (hero): Saturday Oct 6th, 2007 – 35 mile bike ride with my early morning cycling group. Here is a video from my helmet cam of that ride.

Day 2 (hero): Sunday Oct 7th, 2007 – 16 mile run on the hills of Woodbine, MD with group from Montgomery County Road Runners including my good buddy Paz and Denis.

Both workouts where my last hurrah and I had planned this weekend knowing that for the next 6-8 weeks I would see almost zero workouts.

Day 3 (zero): Monday Oct 8th – Arrive at George Washington University hospital Outpatient Surgery Center with my mom at 6am in the morning for the 7:30am surgery. They escorted me into the pre-surgery area where I slipped into something more comfortable, a nice full length fashionable gown!

After 2 failed attempts, they got the third IV inserted correctly (BTW, have you seen my veins, got to be blind to miss). The doctors all gave me pieces of information and instructions for what would happen throughout the surgery. They would put me under using the IV and then they would insert a breathing tube into my mouth and down throat. Then they would perform the 1+ hour surgery. Remove the breathing tube and take me to the recovery room. The last thing I remember is being rolled in and transferred to the operating table and seeing multiple humongous spot lights over head before going to sleep.

While in the recovery room a few hours later, I became lucid. My arm was in an extremely tight sling and completely immobilize. I was told this sling should not be removed for 6 weeks. And no showers! I was also told that during surgery, they had to cut a 4 inch incision over my shoulder, shave down my collar bone to put it back into position, re-attach a muscle and lastly, they had to insert a pin through collar bone and shoulder to hold everything in place during healing. This pin which looked like a coat hanger was sticking out the side of my shoulder in clear site. (But covered with a bandage). The sling could not be removed because movement of my arm would risk breaking that pin. Plus, I noticed I was wearing a different color gown then before the surgery, hmmmmmmm! I hope it was good for them.

Shoulder after surgery. Obviously, they installed a convenient coat hook. By 4:30pm I was heading home. I was barely able to get out of the hospital without becoming nauseous. Half way home my mother had to pull the car over to the side of the road for 10 minutes and crank the air conditioning until the nausea subsided. But we finally made it home. What a fun day!

I slept for almost 2 days straight in a fog of Narcotic pain relief.

I lost my baby today!!! Oct 4th, 2007
Thank you Kryptonite Lock Company. As you can see from the photo, your high security flex cable was cut and I lost my baby. But more interestingly, it was cut and taken in broad daylight (middle of the day) on the busy sidewalks of Washington, DC. (Police report # 136-344)

AND

The $1.99 Made in China padlock was left untouched. That doesn't bode to well for the perceived quality of your high security flex cables, calling yourself ‘Industry leading provider of bicycle Locks.’

O’ and by the way, the bike was a 10+ year old beat up mountain bike. I guess the ease of cutting your cable attracted the thief.

It was a typical bicycle commuting day for me. The 30 mile round trip was almost the same route I used when I got hit by the car just a few weeks ago. I arrived at the DC Ballys gym around 10am. Locked the bike up and went in to shower and change for my customer meetings.

I returned to my gym at about 3:30pm, shocked to see the empty spot on the bike rack. The spot where a few hours earlier my bike was securely locked. Lying on the ground was the cut cable. It was a pitiful site and depressing moment for me.

My only hopes now are that the curse of that bike, due to my accident last week, will stay with the new owner and that I will never buy another Kryptonite Lock. And neither should anyone reading this who doesn’t want to return to a bike rack, to see it empty.

It was statistically inevitable, Goes with the risk and May happen again... Sept. 18th, 2007

One of the worst sounds that I can think of is the loud crushing impact, just as your car collides into another, as the metal of both entangle with each other. And then there is a nanosecond of silence followed but an atmosphere of hysteria. Those sounds and images reverberate in your mind for a long time after such an incident. For me, that image will be me on my bicycle colliding with a car that just made a left turn directly in front of me while I was moving at close to 25mph down 16th street in Washington, DC toward my Grandmothers for our weekly dinner together.

I had just left Bally’s Gym in DC and was headed down 16th street NW on my mountain bike for the short ride, when I was hit. It happen so amazingly fast, there was really no way to have avoided the car. It was travelling in the opposite direction up 16th street and decided to make a left turn directly in front of me. Obviously the driver had not seen me flying down the hill.

I pulled both front and back brakes, but there was no way to stop in time. I squarely hit the passenger side door with the front tire. Then my body followed head and left shoulder first. I remember the impact of my helmet on the windshield and my shoulder on the passenger window. Instantly, I came to a stop and slid to the pavement like a cartoon character that hits a brick wall, flattens out and flows to the ground.

I was conscious and immediately stood up, backpack with laptop and clothing still on my back. I gathered my bike and drag it to the curb. I took about 10 sec’s to collect myself. The lady driving the car rushed over to see if I was ok. She was panicked and called 911. Of course being the mommas boy that I am, I called my mother. I am sure she rushed to her car and headed my way. But of course the fire trucks, ambulance and police car beat her to the location. They carted me off in a stretcher sirens blairing toward GWU Hospital. My bike went to Fire Engine Co. #11 where it still sits.

My left shoulder was a mess. It had swollen the size of a small pumpkin. I was certain that I had dislocated it or broken my collar bone. The nurses at the hospital looked at me and said I didn’t look so good. Well, geez, I just t-boned a car at 25mph on my bicycle. Luckily the x-rays showed nothing broken, but extensive torn ligaments that connect my collar bone to my shoulder. They shot me up with demurral (spelling) and sent me home with a referral for an Orthopedic Surgeon.

My mother met me at the hospital, we went out to dinner and I went home to bed! The sound and image of my impact reverberates in my mind and will for a while. But I feel fine and was very lucky, it could have been much worse.

Sorry no pictures from this adventure.

My Birthday Weekend - September 16, 2007

Well as you can see from the below video clip (click the play button in bottom left corner of image), my Birthday weekend was a barrel of laughs. It began Saturday morning with a 50 mile bike ride with my riding group. We started at Rileys Lock in Potomac, MD and head north toward Dickerson and then rolled through Poolsville back to the start.

Sunday was the annual Montgomery County Road Runners, Parks Half Marathon. It was a cool morning with temps in the high 50's. We started the point to point race at the Rockville Metro station and ran down Viers Mill Road to the Beach Drive trail which took us to the finish in Bethesda. I ran it with my buds Steve and Scott. We all had great times and mine was a PR of 1:26:13 which placed me 7th in my age group and 51st overall.


The afternoon was spent at Little Seneca State Park at the Shaker Craft Festival. The video above, with me and the monkey was taken there.

And then of course was my annual birthday family dinner of Popeyes Fried Chicken. Yummalicious.

Ben Kweller Live in Concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC – September 8th 2007

It's rare to see a rock concert where the lead singer is dripping blood all over his instruments, but the last time I saw Ben Kweller was the Austin City Limits (ACL) Music Festival in 2006. He appeared on stage 10 minutes late and explained to the roaring crowd of more than 30,000 that paramedics where working on him backstage to stop a nose bleed. Well, the paramedics where not successful, because within a few minute into his first song, his nose began to bleed again. He was not able to finish his set.

Anyway, the performance at the Kennedy Center was not nearly as dramatic. The main Concert Hall was packed with a mix of families, and Kweller groupies. Ben played a mix of ballads and his popular rock songs.

To my disappointment there was no mosh pit anywhere in the Concert Hall.

ANNUAL DULLES PLANE PULL - Saturday September 8th

Its not every day that you get to yank 157,000lbs of 727 across the Dulles Airport Tarmac. But for the 3rd straight year our 20 person teams will play this tug of war.

Well, this update is going to be anti-climatic. And I am sorry to say, this event didn't go quite as planned...

After arriving at Dulles airport with a co-worker at 10:30am in time for our teams pre-planned early morning plane pulling time, we where disappointed to learned that our team would not be pulling the plane for at least a few hours. We decided not to waste the day sitting around the Tarmac and sadly turned around and went home.

MONSTER MARATHON AND HALF MARATHON Virgil, NY (Central New York)
Labor Day Weekend, September 2, 2007

This is the toughest marathon course in the East with 5560 ft of total climb. No one will ever qualify for Boston here, but the beauty of this section of the North Country National Scenic Trail and the Finger Lakes Trail is worth the effort (and the fun!). The course consists of two identical out-and-backs of 13.1 miles each.

The day started with my drive from Ithaca, NY where my parents have a cottage on Cayuga Lake. It's 7:15am and the temp is about 44 deg's and kind of cold for September 2nd. 45 minutes of driving past farms and pastures on back roads, I am in the city of Virgil, well if you can call it a city. This was an incredibly small upstate NY town. I find the tiny bar/restaurant on the side of a country road with a dozen cars in the parking lot. This was the race start and a few people were milling about. There where no crowds that we typically see as city slickers in downtown Washington, DC. I found this race on the Internet, while looking for a group to run with while in Ithaca for the Labor Day weekend.

I went to the race registration desk, gave my $25 and find that at that point only 16 people had registered for the half marathon. But it was still early they told me. They wanted to sell me a race shirt with last years race date on it. That was strange?

This was a unique race in other ways, the biggest was they had handicapped start times. The half marathon started at 9am but since I was old (hehehe) I got to start early. A whole 3 minutes early. Many others started before me depending on age and sex. In fact some runners started more than 45 minutes earlier.

More racers begin to show and by my start time there where a whooping 40 registered racers. I was the only one in my heat and at 8:57am I was alone at the start line. The race director yelled 'GO' over the microphone, which he didn’t really need to do since I was right next to him and the only one at the start line. It was very silly, but I was off.

The first mile progressed toward the end of a dead end country road. I passed lift #5 of Greek Peak Ski area and knew I was in for some hills. Once on the trail, I was hit with 2 miles of a constant and steep uphill climbing of almost 2000 vertical feet. It was incredibly steep; I walked a few seconds here and there finally making it to the top and the water stop 3.2 miles into the race and 36 minutes later. Ouch thats about a 10 minute mile average. It’s gonna be a long day!

The next 3’ish miles to the turn around where rolling hills and numerous small stream crossings. I was warned of the ‘monsters’ in this Monster Marathon, and at about 50 minutes into the race, as I focused on the trail and placement of each step so as not to twist an ankle. I was running alone through a small field when a fully camouflaged ‘thing’ jumped out and growled at me! It scared the crap out of me and I may have even let out a little yelp. I had been warned at the start of monsters on the trail, but wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. I laughed hysterically alone in the woods for the next 10 minutes as my heart rate returned to normal race levels from the scare! Hehehe, nothing like a small town race with monsters on the course.

Anyway, I finally get to the 6 mile turn around point, downed a GU with 2x caffeine, snag a cup of Gatorade and made the U-turn back toward the start. The enormous cheering section of 2-3 people at the turn around kept me going.

I picked up the pace for the return; I was feeling great and passed a few people here and there. No monsters on the return trip but I was still laughing about it. Got back to the dead and road and brought it in! Finish time of 2:03 which put me in 13 place overall. Not bad since we had the handicap start times.

AFter crossing the finish line, I got this really nice burlap necklace with a piece of cork attached to it that said Monster Marathon 2007.

It was a good workout and a great day. Now back to the lake for a swim.