From coaching hundreds of kids at the Superbowl NFL Experience with Under Armour, to shooting and editing my first tv commercial quality brand messaging videos for Saris Cycling Group, to venturing out to do a full moon snowshoe hike up at Big Bear Mountain with Team Sole only to stick around long enough to manage to break my face backcountry skiing for the first time the next day, to being embedded with the Jelly Belly Pro Cycling Team during the entire epic Amgen Tour of California producing behind the scenes videos of it all...
...it was one helluva memorable month!
My Big Bear Broken Face story goes like this:
Drove up Sunday evening to join a group led by Paul Romero and Kathy Lundgren of Team Sole, both world class adventure racers and ski/snowboarders, for a hardcore full-moon backcountry snowshoe hike. Immediately the epic-ness of the trip started. It was snowing, pretty hard, so there wasn't much of a moon, and there were no trails to be found. Truly all trailblazing in soft awesome powder in the middle of nowhere with people I'd only just met and hardly knew what they looked like. Shared a hot toddy somewhere on the mountain and then regrouped for a home cooked meal back at their house which they graciously offered up to me, since it was a three hour drive from San Diego.
Well it snowed so hard overnight that there was no getting down the mountain, in my Prius that is, the whole next day, which meant lots of play time to be had...and I knew it would be rad, because of Paul and Karen, but I had no idea how much so. I must mention that Paul's son is Jordan Romero. Amazing amazing 12-year old who is attempting to climb the Seven Summits of the World: the highest peaks on each of the 7 continents. He has summitted 5 so far including 20320' Denali most recently.
In short that day went like this:
Eat. Shovel the driveway. Shovel the road. Core workout on snowshoes with the shovels on our backs up and down the street lunging every which way. 40 minute snowshoe workout in the woods behind their house, with hill repeats and then some giggling as we leaped downhill in the deepest wide open powder i'd ever seen. More shoveling...it was snowing that much. Breakfast. From their house we snowshoed 30 minutes or so up to the ski slopes (couldn't drive, too much snow.) Rented skis. Skied for a couple hours, non-stop since there were no lines on the lifts, in lots of fresh powder (it was still snowing.) Skied through trees between the ski slopes like I'd never done before (took me a couple of runs and a few fun crashes to work out my weight distribution in powder, which is much different than without. Eventually I got the hang of it and had more and more fun.) When the lifts closed, we grabbed our backpacks which had our snowshoes and boots and headed off to ski home backcountry to their house all of about 1km away. That's when it got nuts.
Since the trails were all snowed over we missed a turn and got into some really sketchy, too-many-trees-and-rocks-and-boulders-to-ski-in-a-continuous-path kind of stuff. At some point before we realized we had to turn around and hike back up, I took a step that didn't go as planned and fell downward face first (sailor dive style) no hands (it must've happened too fast for them to react probably because i had the pack on and my feet were rooted to the ground in the skis) into a big boulder whose tip was jutting out of the thigh high snow. Had helmet and goggles on, but hit square on my cheekbone. I was catapulted up and over the boulder and landed below in in the snow. Ouch. My bone seemed intact but my face was split open and swelled up immediately. Paul pulled me up and since I seemed to be ok (which I was, amazingly enough) we continued down the mountain for a bit, but then took off skis and hiked back up to find the trail. We found it, and made our way back home hours later than planned, finishing that leg of the trip in some pretty gnarly backcountry stuff but in dark.
I snowplowed my way down in the tracks my friend had just made, didn't crash again which was a blessing. Got home, cleaned up the face. Went to eat an amazing Nepalese meal at the Himalayan. Waited to get back to San Diego the next day to get my face looked at by a plastic surgeon to spare myself from a botch job of stitches at the ER, praying that 24hrs wasn't going to make a big difference. Luckily I gave my friend, Active.com CEO, Dave Alberga a heads up as to what happened as I was driving home and
he connected me with someone at Active whose brother, Dr. Karam, is a stellar facial plastic surgeon, just miles from my home. THANK YOU! When I walked in Dr. Karam said, "Is it broken?" and I answered, "No." He said, "How do you know?" I said, "Hmmm, you're right, I don't know!" And luckily he prescribed a CT scan to confirm and it was, but only hairline fractures. Looking back at photos I realized how obvious it was that it was broken! I never really felt any pain either so that helped. I don't think I had a concussion but someone pointed out the fact that if I never felt pain, that's a sign that I probably had one. Either way, I was SUPER lucky. (More like blessed. I know who my angels are. Thanks you guys and gals!!!) It was stitched up beautifully and healed so quickly! Looked like a bruiser all during the Tour of California let me tell ya. All good though.
Learned that I'm able to push my limits to find my limits. Pretty cool. I'd rather risk it than never know, ya know?
Also learned that the face heals amazingly fast...with the help of great nutrition and high metabolism I'm sure. Thank goodness. That first picture is the day of my stitches and the second is 10 days later. Got them out by Garmin Team doc Shannon morning of Stage 4. Easy peasy.
The adventure continues, but now its going to be about proper performance training for a while...off-road, i'll be back :)
