Keep Moving

Storms have chased me everywhere recently, it seems.

I've been going through an extremely bad phase with my spine. Jolting electrical pain down my legs has made life miserable. It's been tough to keep moving but I know, from many years of experience, that motion is the best thing.

K joins me for easy mountain bike rides every morning. Look at that sky over the Divide even early in the morning! It's rare to be rained on and hear rumbles of thunder at 8 AM but it happened yesterday.

The Divide almost disappeared behind swirling and angry clouds a little later in my ride.

The stormy skies seem to reflect whatever is going on in my spine. I've done something, although I'm not sure what, to make my nerves very very angry. It wasn't the epic odyssey that I wrote about in the last post because I was fine for more than 2 weeks after that ride.

So, I'm keeping moving and trying not to let the word "surgery" creep into my thinking. I know that another fusion is sitting out there in the future waiting for me (my MRIs show a host of disintegrating discs) but I'm trying to delay for as long as possible to protect the remaining unfused parts of my spine. As soon as more joints are fused, the stress increases at the adjacent ones and degrades those discs. Thus, a fusion tends to increase in length as the remaining discs fall like dominoes.

Yesterday, during my easy ride, I ran into a friend who has a young horse. Her horse is inexperienced around bikes so we joined together for a combined horse and mountain bike excursion for a short loop. We were quite a sight - a mountain bike in front, a young and peppy trotting horse with a rider behind me, and finally a loose horse running along next to us. My friend and I giggled the whole way!

After saying farewell to the horse brigade, I spotted a mother wild turkey with TEN babies. I captured a photo of the mother and three babies but the others were nearby. The babies look almost ready to set out on their own.

Getting out and moving is the best thing for me. And, along the way, I see so many beautiful things that I briefly forget the pain - a very good thing!