Sunday afternoon, I finished all my homework early. I wanted to have a nice long workout, and I debated going for a bike ride or going for a swim. It was a really nice day, so I decided to go for a bike ride.

I should have gone for a swim.

About 32 miles into my ride, I was coming back towards the Marina near LAX, when a pair of tourists decided that they should cross the bike path in order to get down to the beach.

Bikers have the right of way on this path, but it’s not terribly well-marked so you get a lot of idiots meandering across it and causing all sorts of problems.

I saw them going at a speed that would cause me to run into them, so I rang my bell at them and then shouted when that didn’t seem to budge them. They sped up imperceptibly, causing me to have to swerve around them.

I swerved right onto what turned out to be more sand than I thought, and I lost traction completely. I was probably going about 15-16 miles an hour, and I ate it hard right onto the concrete bike path.

I was down for a few seconds after it happened, and several bystanders rushed over to ask if I was all right. I was definitely a little dazed, but I also definitely noticed that the idiot/asshole tourists just kept on walking towards the beach, not even caring that they made me crash.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it now with significantly more vehemence: Fucking tourists.

I was very, very glad I was wearing a helmet – my brain would have been splattered on the concrete if I hadn’t been. All in all, I’m pretty lucky – I could have done much more serious damage to my head and could have really fucked up my shoulder if I’d landed a little differently.

I’m still pretty banged up. Almost all my weight came down on my left arm and my left leg, causing some really awesome road rash on the former and since I carry my phone in my left front pocket, shattering my phone and leaving the biggest, nastiest bruise I’ve ever had (more on that later).

I wasn’t anywhere near a place where someone could come pick me up easily, and my bike was too jacked up to ride, so I started walking with the bike towards the Marina.

As I did, I figured out that although the screen was shattered and the LCD was shot, I could make phone calls using the voice command feature on my phone, and about 1/10 of the time manage to swipe frantically enough at the shattered glass to answer incoming calls.

After lots and lots of phone calls and about three miles of walking, I walked into an ER in Marina del Rey, where I was promptly informed there was a 6-8 hour wait.

Luckily, my friend Jessica, who is my new hero, called me back right then and after I was miraculously able to answer the phone, she offered to come rescue me and my bike, which was pretty much the best timing ever.

We took my bike home, making a pit stop at Carl’s Jr. on the way since I was ravenously hungry. I’d basically biked off about 2500 calories before I crashed, then walked for an hour after the crash.

We then went to UCLA medical center, where the wait was only 2.5 hours, which seemed so much more civilized. Gotta love the ER theory of relativity.

The ER docs determined that since I didn’t have a headache and that eating a Western Bacon Cheeseburger made me feel better and not worse, I didn’t need a CAT scan, and gave me a metric ton of antibiotic ointment for all my road rash.

Jessica dropped me off around 11:30, and I noticed just before I went to bed that where my phone had hit, the bruise hadn’t formed yet, but there was a big swollen lump about the size of a baseball. “That’s going to get ugly,” I thought.

It’s now a bruise the size of an appetizer plate, and about 15 different shades of purple. I do not bruise easily – a spot on my right leg where it’d hit the pedal hard enough to leave an outline of where it hit is barely discolored – so for me to have a bruise this gnarly is something of an accomplishment.

The bruise is still warm to the touch, which I suspect means it’s still not done forming. I put the over/under on how long it’s going to take to dissipate at 2 months, and so far, anyone who’s seen it in person has taken the over.

I managed to get the phone fixed for about $150 and was back up and running on Monday. If you’re in LA and you bust your iPhone, the guy at LAiPhoneRepair.com is the man.

The bike’s still at the shop – I was due for a warranty tune-up so that will probably take at least some of the sting out of it, but they’re going to have to clean about four tons of sand out of the chain, gears, and brakes, not to mention all the damage done to same by the actual crash. I’ll be stunned if I get out of that for under $200.

Plus my $100 ER copay plus whatever else UCLAMC decides to ding me for (I’m sure that big pile of what’s essentially Neosporin will wind up costing me about $45), plus having to buy a new helmet because they’re really only designed for one good hit, and the total cost of crashing my bike will come in somewhere between $300-500, probably.

I’m extremely glad this was more of a fiscal misadventure than a medical one, but still: Fucking tourists.

—–

Addendum: This is apparently Bad Bike week for everyone I know. I had two friends have bikes stolen (one off a second floor balcony, apparently by Spider-Man), I crashed, Lindsay crashed – Seriously, if you know me, lock your bike up tight and then stay the hell away from it.

In case you’ve ever wondered, “So, what happens when you’re biking along and a car creates a small pothole and sends little chunks of asphalt everywhere?”

I can now say: You hear the bang, and half a second later you feel an intense pain in your thigh. You pull over for a second, say, “OW, what the FUCK?” and stare at your thigh, and see a little red circle about the size of a dime where the chunk hit you.

The red circle will turn into an angry red welt, but the pain at least goes away after five minutes or so (or at least it does if you continue biking). However, as my dad pointed out: Better that it hit me in the thigh than in the face.

I don’t know if it’s been reading about the potential SAG strike or the fact that we’re going to have a double-unit Monday to welcome us back from Thanksgiving, but apparently my problem of grinding my teeth has gotten a bit worse.

And by “a bit worse” I mean, goddamn, the tendons in my jaw are killing me. It started early this afternoon (I thought it was a cavity until I realized I could push on the teeth I thought were affected and felt nothing, but opening my mouth absolutely killed) and has been getting worse throughout the day.

I mean, perhaps it’s a good thing for my continued weight loss attempts that at the rate I’m going I’m not going to be able to open my mouth on Thanksgiving, but goddamn it, I want to be able to eat at least one of the three Thanksgiving dinners I’m stopping by.

Bah.

I went for a looooooong bike ride today. I wanted to do the entire Marvin Braude trail, but I came up a little short.

The entire trail is 22 miles each way, and I have to bike 2 miles each way to get to the trail. If I’d done the whole thing, I would have gone 48 miles.

Instead, I went all the way to the South end, about two miles south of the Redondo Beach pier. This was about 5 miles South of where I stopped the last time I rode the trail, which was a significantly larger gap than I had realized, so I was a lot more tired by the time I reached the South end when I thought.

The wind was whipping pretty good coming back North, so I think that’s part of what tired me out so much. I think I also need to bring more than a granola bar along to refuel.

I wasn’t really hungry per se, but I noticed I got a lot more tired than I did during my last ride that far South, during which my friends and I stopped for brunch. Pancakes and Guinness are apparently a far more efficient fuel than one wee granola bar.

But I managed to get all the way back to the Santa Monica pier, which is just over 18 miles north of Redondo (and about 3/4 of a mile north of where I got on) before my the combination of the setting sun and my body saying “GET OFF THE BIKE!” determined that I should probably head home.

I wound up breaking down and buying a comically overpriced 20oz Gatorade at the S.M. pier, and I felt WAY better after that, so perhaps I shall invest in some for my next ride.

However, I did 39 miles total, which is nothing to sneeze at, and about 80% of the entire way. We’ll see how many of my limbs I can actually move tomorrow, but for right now, I’m pretty happy I managed to go as far as I did.

This probably wasn’t the most dignified way for the Caps to wind up tying their playoff game last night:

Note the guy that falls over: He took a direct hit to the family jewels with the puck, and now the poor bastard might wind up minus one of them.

Yow. Even being a Caps fan, I’m not sure that play shouldn’t have been blown dead before Mike Green scored. I think it happened too fast for the refs to realize what had happened, but still, sucks for the Flyers.

Thanks(?) to Deadspin for the tip.

Not only interwebs, but the return of SPECTACULAR HD to the Gigantic Damn Television, on which I am currently watching Oregon stomp Michigan, and laaaaaaaaughing and laughing.

The only problem is that I think I am going to need a bionic left foot. Anyone have a spare?

It’s called the “it takes a lot of effort and pain to get up” diet.

It forces you to ask yourself: Exactly how hungry am I? Generally, the answer is: Okay, not that hungry. Also, ow.

This is getting more ridiculous on a daily basis.

So I went to Dr. Hot Shit, who I’d been trying to get in with for a while (and who I got some strings pulled to get into), in order to get a third and final opinion on my foot.

Of course, he thinks something else is wrong with it than the first two guys seemed to be in general agreement that it was.

The good news is, he seems to have good reason. He took some new X-rays and basically was able to place the exact spot on my foot that has the most excruciating pain simply by looking at them and seeing something that’s been overlooked.

The better news is that if it is what he thinks it is (aggravation of the accessory navicular bone, for those who give a fuck), the fix is a lot less elaborate.

It still means surgery and a month on crutches, but only another month of rehab after, instead of another month in a walking cast and two more months of rehab for what the other guys think it is.

The weird part was, in order to help test his theory, he wanted to tape my foot to address his suspicion, then take some stress off my aggravated tendon (which is aggravated by my calf muscle on the bad leg being slightly too short).

He asked me to wear inch-and-a-half heels, and when I laughed “Do I look like someone who even owns shoes like that?” in his face at this suggestion, he asked me if I had cowboy boots.

And I thought, “Oh yeah, I guess those do have about inch-and-a-half heels.” And then I felt slightly dumb.

So I spent all of today taped up, wearing cowboy boots, and oddly substantially more comfortable than I should have been, given that I was wearing my single most uncomfortable pair of shoes.

So, possibly further details to come. I’m going back to Dr. Hot Shit tomorrow for a follow-up, and then to my original guy to say, “So, nice miss there, buck-o!” on Thursday.

Maybe I’ll even have a goddamn answer to what the fuck is going on. Wouldn’t that be nice?

So my orthopedist stuck me in a boot for a couple weeks starting last Thursday to try and stabilize my collapsing arch.

The boot is a little hilarious because it has a pump which can allegedly be used to pump up the cast to give more support. It’s about as effective as the pumps in my Reeboks in fifth grade, which is to say: Not effective at ALL.

Anyway, it seemed to be working over the weekend. My boss was out of town Thursday, and I just went to the gym (recumbent bike, which puts just about zero pressure on the ankle, plus arm-based lifting) and then slept all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

But Monday, when I went back to a real work schedule, the façade came down. My job involves a lot of running around, and when you’ve got one of these fuckers on, it’s like dragging an anchor around.

The good news was that it seemed to be doing its job and making the parts of my foot that had been hurting hurt a lot less.

The bad news was, it’s so heavy and immobilizing it’s a) killing the rest of my lower left leg and b) making me absolutely exhausted.

I’ve already made two dumb mistakes at the end of the day this week because I was so tired I couldn’t focus on anything but getting home and getting my leg out of Foot Jail.

Luckily I’ve finally got a second and third opinion set up in the next week, so at least I’ll have some idea of what can finally be done to rid myself of this horseshit on a more permanent basis. And really, rid all you of it too, since I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about it.

Doesn’t mean I’m going to stop bitching about it though. I don’t think this blog would still exist if I didn’t have medical maladies to whine about.

So in anticipation of probably at least needing some sort of surgery and having to cart my ass around on crutches for a period of time longer than five minutes, I’ve started lifting weights.

The last time I was on crutches, I was on them for about three days of actually using them properly, and my arms just about fell off.

The fact that I’m very overweight also really hit me hard I was on crutches. Every time I took a step with crutches, it was basically like doing a 200+ lb bench press. I had just about zero muscle tone in my arms, and it became quite literally painfully obvious.

This time, however, I’ve got a little warning. I can at least focus my workouts so that my arms only feel like they’re going to fall off at a point where they don’t have to carry my body weight.

Since realistically any surgery is not going to happen until the third week of May, I’ve got about eight weeks to get my arms, shoulders, and chest as strong as possible, and it’s a race against time for me to try and get ready.

My start hasn’t been great. I can really only do about 30 lbs. on several of the machines, and no more than 50 on anything.

I did 50 on one machine this morning (I have no idea what it’s called, but you lift straight up over your head and it works the back and the muscles under your upper arm), and I couldn’t lift my arms above shoulder level until late this afternoon.

I’m going to try and meet with a trainer at my gym next week to get some advice on what muscle groups I need to target. Hopefully I can gain enough strength so that the transition to crutches isn’t too horrible.

However, if I don’t post for a few days, it probably means I’ve overdone it and I can’t lift my hands to the keyboard. If that happens, I’ll try to type out SEND HELP with my nose.