Easter 2017

These sailors were the only ones out and were also jibing with a spinnaker up. 

I arrived home from work before dark one night and took advantage of the sunset to try a new used telephoto lens on my camera 

In the morning I wake up and I have the same consistent first-thought as I do every single morning no matter where I am or what time it is. It's the same thought that I've had for ten years, every morning. This thought provokes a sequence of memories that flash by and that tell me that I need to clench with my toes and shake my ankles to make sure I still have that connection from brain to feet. Next, engage my core for a second to rotate my waist thereby measuring how much pain I will be for the day. When I was 21 I was in a car accident that herniated a disc in my lower back. The lawyers mostly disagreed about the cause because of a million factors that kept me from seeing a doctor as soon as possible. Since then, other discs have worn down to compensate for the degenerative ones and it's a problem compiling on itself, crunching my spine, bulging into my spinal cord, pinching nerves. I usually dream at night and when I wake up during a dream I was just fully aware of the fact and that I felt no pain in my back or legs, my focus was on my environment and whatever my brain was creating for me. When I'm awake, my focus on my task at hand is always weighed down by variable constant pain and limits from my injury. On most days the think I look forward to most is being able to do something physically active to stretch and engage my affected parts because nine times out of ten I feel better afterwards. Last Saturday was a one out of ten result. I was able to wake up early, knowing full well that there would be good surf and that Mia had promised to come to the beach with me and support my hobbies. I woke up, checked the feeling and mobility of the lower half of my body, noting that just yesterday at the gym I was really feeling great, almost as good as I could feel since the injury. I shouldn't have ever acknowledged that, it will jinx me. It did.  We drove to the beach, walked down the steps, set up Mia's beach chair and a towel and I zipped up my wetsuit and started to do some light stretches. I squatted down, engaged my legs muscles, stood up and SNAP, or BOOM, or POP, or PLUCK, SCRATCH, TEAR, whatever it would translate to, it's a feeling like a bear trap the size of my body just closed on my back, a hundred sharp teeth locking into various parts of my back, neck, and legs, reducing my range of mobility without pain to around 1%. Every muscle movement feels abrasive. The waves were good, we carved out the time for me to do enjoy my hobby of bodysurfing and surfing. Maybe, I thought, the pain would subside after I got in the water and started to paddle and let my body weight float. I caught two head-high barreling, low-tide draining waves and if not for the adrenaline forcing my muscle-memory to stand up on the board, I would've just been tossed off the lip of the breaking wave from 6 feet in the air to really shallow water below. After the second wave, I floated to the beach only using my arms and when I got my feet on the sand I had enough range of motion to make six-inch steps and shuffle across the sand back to Mia. I didn't want to waste my opportunity to enjoy free time and good surfing conditions and I thought there was still a chance to get in the water and relax the muscles. So I put on my fins and paddles back out to bodysurf and stretch in the weightlessness of the ocean. A few minutes later I got out, we made our way back to my truck and it took about 5 painful minutes to contort myself out of my wetsuit. I fought with my reflexes, which were telling my body to stop moving, in order to sit in the drivers seat and operate the pedals. I decided a long time ago not to let this injury prevent me from doing what I like to do, and it still often does, but today there were already plans. 

We took the boat to pump it out, packed our bags and drove to Sierra Madre to visit Mia's family for Easter weekend. From then on, thankfully, I was able to roll around on their wide open floors (something the boat lacks) and stretch my legs and enjoy a few beers to ease my sensitivity to the pain. We hiked on Sunday morning and I think for the most part I was able to silently deal the creaking door and shooting pain from my back sufficiently enough that it didn't take away from enjoying everyone's company, the weather, the meals, and the fun. It's been 10 days since that occurrence and I've been doing what I can at the gym to nurse myself back to a more tolerable level of pain but I'm not going to peg a status on the improvements to re-jinx myself.