News

I’m not always sure that people understand dog humor, but here’s a few of my cartoons anyway.- R

It seems that as BMX increasingly becomes more and more technical many riders are feeling overwhelmed by the difficulty. At the same time it seems like many young rider are making it all look just too easy. Today Fairdale introduces two new concepts to solve both problems.

First up is the Nose-Peg nosewheelie learning device. We took the normal axle peg and fitted it with a small “learning” wheel. The peg can be rotated on the axle to find the optimum balance point. In this way a rider can learn to roll around on his front wheel.

If like many of today’s young riders you find BMX to be just too easy we introduce the “Ironing Board” BMX to Uni-cycle adapter. Our engineers claim a 500% increase in riding difficulty with this adapter over a normal BMX. The scissor like device can be adjusted to fit any BMX bicycle by simply attaching to the front and rear dropouts. An ordinary BMX rear wheel is fitted to the device and a chain is connected to provide locomotion.

“Smooth out your BMX style with the Fairdale Ironing Board BMX to Uni-cycle adapter!!”

A little over a year ago I hurt my back pretty badly and ended up having a surgery to try and fix it. I documented the process on my old blog over at Transworld BMX. A  number of people have been asking me lately how things are going so it seemed like an update was due.  I also posted a little re-cap of some of the old posts below for those who are interested.

Well, it’s been over a year since I’ve been able to ride. I guess I’ve been putting off this post-surgery update hoping I would have something very positive to post. Hopefully something about how I was all better and back to riding. The reality though is that getting back on my bike is going very slowly. I’m still keeping up with all my physical therapy and rehab and for the most part I’m functioning like normal. I can sit again, don’t have any weight restrictions on what I lift and can ride around on a bike no problem. I still can’t “really” ride though. If I so much as hop up a curb shooting pain hits me right in the surgery area. Its pretty frustrating and been this way for about the last 5 months. I get the same pain if I pump a ramp at all as well. The result is that I can roll around, but really can’t get off the ground without my eyes watering from the pain. I saw the doctor again a couple weeks ago and he now wants me to wait another 5 months before he possibly performs another surgery that would take me out for an additional 6 months! Not really sure how that will work out. In the meantime I have been making an effort to push myself harder in the gym and that seems to be helping a tiny bit. I went and rode the new Empire ramp the other day and I actually got about 15 minutes of below coping riding in before I got too sore. All I can really do is to keep working on getting stronger and more flexible to compensate for the fused together disc.

One of the possible causes of this is that the discs above the surgery were also damaged. Not nearly as severely as the one that was removed, but still significant enough to be causing some of this pain. Especially now that they are forced to move even more to compensate for the fused one that can not move at all.  I guess its not abnormal for recovery to take several years too, but hopefully it won’t take that long for me.

I have been riding around more and more. I can really feel the difference in my back… its even changed my riding position ever so slightly. I’m sure part of it is that I am protecting the painful area, but also because I simply can not bend my back the same was as before.

Here’s the recap of how I got here:

May-22-2009
I haven’t been riding a whole lot lately because of my chronic back problems. Its been a real trouble for me for the last 4 or 5 years. For a while it went away and maybe I solved the original problem, or maybe it was just hidden.

I’ve been in Cleveland for the last month and I got a gym membership to work on rehabing my back. 5 or 6 days a week in the gym working really hard and doing every exercise I’ve learned for core strength and I felt stronger and in better shape then I have in years. I got back to Austin for a couple week visit and after 10 minutes of riding in a ditch down the street my back was screwed. Odyssey really needed a photo of me for an ad so a couple days later I took a handful of advil, got Sandy Carson to bring a camera and tried to get a photo done. Everytime I hit the lip of a nice hip I found I got a bright white shot of pain radiatiing from my lower back and curse word would shoot out of my mouth.

May-29-2009
Just got back from the first visit with my new doctor. All went well. He is a spinal surgeon, but he didn’t seem to think that surgery was the guaranteed way to go.

Of course, the usual drill ensued… “Go get an MRI and come back”.

June-3-2009
Just back from the doctors and just went over my MRI results. Heavy news for me. Looks like we are going to do the fusion surgery of L5-S1. Surgery won’t take place for almost a month, but when it does Its only like a 2 day stay in the hospital, but it means that after surgery no activity for 3 months and no riding for real for 6 months! Yikes. I didn’t really expect it to take that long to heal.

The crazy part is they go in through the front of your abdomen to do the surgery. Its a relatively small incision, but two surgeons are present. One to do the actual screw and plate and bone graft surgery, and one to monitor and control the extremely vital arteries that run right in front of the spine. Basically they screw and plate the vertebrae together so they can’t move, and then fill the area where the disc used to be with bone grafts that will fill it in so the damaged disc can no longer put pressure on the spine.

Next step is to meet with the Vascular Surgeon to go over his procedures in the surgery and check to see if my splenectomy scars are going to be an issue for this surgery. After meeting with him I’ll be able to schedule a surgery date. The earliest possible time being between 3 and 4 weeks from now.
I’m pretty freaked out by all this, and dreading being laid up for so long, but at the same time I’m really itching to get this taken care of. Guess I’m staying in Austin for a while to deal with all of this.
June-15-2009
I met with the Cardio-Vascular surgeon and got a date for surgery. July 9th they slice me up. He described in detail how they will make an incision from my belly button straight down about 4 inches. Then he pushes all the intestines and stuff out of the way making a hole visible all the way to my spine. The really dangerous part is that he then must move my aorta blood vessel out of the way by gently flexing it to one side. While he was telling me it really started to make me a little bit queazy.

June-18-2009
Jamie Bestwick was kind enough to set me up to talk to his doctor about spine surgeries. Dr Gregory Bailey did the fusion surgery that Jamie had done a little while ago and had him riding again in 5 weeks. Dr Bailey confirmed that based on my symptoms and MRI surgery did seem to be the right path. He also made me feel pretty confident about my surgeons. Definitely nice to get a good second opinion. He also restated that a six month recovery time is to be expected with the type of surgery I’ll get (which is substantially different then Jamie’s fusion which was more in his neck).
July-3-2009
So this is what they are going to stick into my back. As far as I can tell its a piece of PVC pipe with a big gnarly stainless screw in it. There will actually be 2 more screws too. One going up and two going down. Just like toe-nailing a rib on a ramp or something. This little do-hickey will take the place of the disc they are taking out and lock the to adjacent vertabrae in place. The docs tell me I’m not supposed to lift anything over 10 pounds for three whole months!
July-15-2009
Well, I had surgery on July 9th. I spent 3 days in the hospital and the Westlake Hospital in Austin was by far the nicest hospital I’ve ever stayed in. Had my own room and a 50″ plasma TV. The surgery went smoothly and easily and only took an hour and a half. About 3 hours after surgery I was awake and feeling pretty decent. I had the doctors take me off the pain medicine and I found the pain to be fairly mild. All I wanted to do was drink some water and I mistakenly had it in my head that if I wasn’t on pain med they would let me drink sooner. I made it about 16 hours with no pain med at all which I found to be really amazing… they had just sliced me open and drilled holes in my bones! For the first 24 hours they were taking my blood pressure every 30 minutes and I noticed that it went up every time. Right before I gave in and took some pain med it was starting to get dangerously high. I guess that was how my body was dealing with the pain.
And, I was wrong, pain meds had nothing to do with me being allowed water. What it was is that the doctors wanted me to fart before they gave me anything to eat or drink. The reason being is that they moved my intestines around to get to my spine (since the surgery was performed through my stomach) and there was a chance they may have punctured an intestine. I guess if you drink and eat and have a hole in your intestine its very painful and dangerous and requires a emergency surgery to correct the problem. SO, I had to wait for 2 days for my body to naturally um, er…. pass some wind and prove that I was still air tight. It was harder then it sounds because my ab muscles had just been sliced in two.

Anyway, while waiting for some wind and water other uncomfortable things did start to be removed. Got my catherder out the first day which was awesome (ha! good example of the pills… spellchecked this and look how I spelled catheter… Cat Herder!!) . I also got to get up and walk around when I wanted. Moving around for sure made me feel like my blood was starting to move and things were starting to get better.
On the beginning of the 2nd day I went back on pain pills, partially because my blood pressure was racing and partially because things were simply starting to hurt like hell! Now that I’m home (starting my 3rd day home now) I’ve been sticking to a schedule of pain meds. I find they make me kind of silly and stressed out at the same time. Weird things like I dreamed the refrigerator was leaking and couldn’t quite separate dream from reality. Had to get up and actually see if it was leaking before I could sleep again. Been sleeping a lot and feeling zombie-fied when I’m awake, but every so often I feel pretty clear and with it. Already cutting back on the pain meds now and I can tell that each day I am making steps towards healing. The only thing that really hurts badly is the incision in my stomach. I’m sure that will heal quickly since its no different then a normal cut. The doctor warned that my back would hurt badly for 6-8 weeks as a result of the “construction” in the area, but as of yet I haven’t felt it.
My mom is in town for a couple weeks taking care of me. Yesterday her and Sandy Carson went bought a Lazy Boy recliner chair that I found for cheap on craigslist. It is seriously the best and most comfortable thing ever for my situation. I can lounge in it all day and its amazing. I’m so lucky and so happy.

Pain pills are starting to kick in and its getting harder and harder for me to type. For the next 3 months I’ll be taking it easy not lifting anything heavier then 10 pounds. Once I can concentrate again hopefully I will start drawing or something. Take care everyone!

I’ve gotten to do a lot of things in my life. Been around a while now as I enter my 77th year. One of the things that people always get a kick out of is seeing me in my youth starring in a BMX video.

You can watch the whole thing here. It was really fun working with Dave Parrick and Taj and shooting everything in super 8 film. I really prefer working with film. Its so superior to digital.

I also used to have a line of signature shoes. I never had much use for shoes myself, but, you gotta make the money you know? Etnies was always pretty cool anyway and I was really glad to get to design them. Of course I made them 100% vegetarian…. more cows for me! In my contract it was actually agreed that I should get raw hide bones equal to exactly how much cow hide they saved by using synthetics for my shoe.

Anyway, back to my video. Although I really wanted to do all the stunts myself union regulations kept me from doing most of the work. In hindsight it was probably for the best, but at the time I was so pissed at that dummy version of me… Out there having a blast while I spent hours in a stupid make up chair doing nothing. I did get really good at riding the cart though during the less dangerous shots. It might look easy, but really it takes a lot of body english to keep that thing on track.

At the end of filming the crew let me destroy my stunt double dummy. It was a huge release. Kind of one of those Office Space printer beat down scenes in real life. Not to get all metaphysical but I kind of felt like I was taking my life back with my lifeless clone out of the way.

I would have to say that film work isn’t for me (long hours and sitting around to racing around in seconds flat), but I am glad to have gotten the experience. As you travel through life its the one off things like this that lead to good stories later on.

Dude, this new bone is the best! Chicken flavored raw hide. I’m going to carry this around for at least a couple weeks before I even think about chewing it up. This thing is awesome!

So this is what I wake up to every morning. My (sometimes) little buddy Monty. He’s one of those morning people (not sure if morning-dog is a term). Wakes up so peppy and ready to go. I could easily sleep a few more hours but sure enough, 7:30 am every morning this little guy is rolling around and trying to play. Go back to bed Monty!

Tandems are amazing bicycles. All the efficiency and zero ecological footprint of a normal bicycle, but multiplied by two for two riders. The only downside is that tandems are not fit for single person use. It may be a substantial investment on your part to purchase a tandem so we have developed a way to keep your bicycle functional during those unfortunate times when you do not have a second rider.

Lonely Tandem Handlebars

Introducing Lonely Tandem Handlebars. The perfect solution for divorcee’s, widowers, or just any single person who loves to ride a tandem.

This well engineered bar features a zero degree up sweep design with a 90 degree back sweep. Very comfortable for even long solo tandem rides.