The trick is to get back on

 March 21, 2017 started out like every day before it. I was on a roll. In the last year I had instructed over 125 spin classes as a substitute instructor and was covering 12 gyms. Quite often in that time period, I would awaken about 4am, check my email and realize an instructor in Houston, or the Galleria had called in sick for the 5:30am class. I would log into the gym web site and "claim" the class and when 5:30am arrived, I would be 35 miles away and crank out a class. Sometimes I would be in Pasadena a few hours later and instruct another one. Or League City, or Webster. I was bullet-proof. Or so it seemed.

My sister and 3 brothers and I are all in our 60's and we share the common complaint of seniors, that stuff stops working like it did when we were younger. I appeared to be blessed in that I could hike down into the Grand Canyon and back out with nothing more than a bit of discomfort to my flat-lander's legs the next day. If I desired to ride a bike 30 miles, no big deal and the next day, it was business as usual. I got the message that I was doing everything right physically.

I was filling in for an instructor at the NASA gym location at 8am and drove over and instructed the class with my usual amount of vigor and enthusiasm and I really enjoy pushing a difficult, high-resistance hill-climbing class. Most spin class instructors are go-go-go with an abundance of very fast lower resistance peddling. Its called sprinting and they add a lot of upper body movements to keep people from being bored. I don't. In fact, I try to stay pure to the exercise and don't do anything on a spin bike that I wouldn't do on a road or mountain bike. To be clear, a spin bike is a stationary bicycle with a resistance knob. I like to push a class where the rider motivates themselves to get the best work-out possible. I am not a "driver". I'm a motivator.

I remember that morning I awoke with a stiff neck, like I had slept on it wrong or something, but by the time that class was over, my stiff neck went from mild discomfort to straight through the roof excruciating, eye-watering pain. I could hardly drive back to Baytown. My right arm was becoming so numb I simply laid it in my lap on the drive home. I was panicking and wondering if I was having a stroke.

To make a long story shorter here I am one year later - better, but unable to resume instructing. I'm not in pain and I can function fairly normally. What happened is called cervical spinal stenosis and what my VA doctor describes as "nasty neck" and affects the top 7 vertebra. To sum it up, the vertebra are impinging on the nerves causing the pain and numbness and headaches, bad headaches.

The Veterans Administration's treatment was massive amounts of steroids and shots and pills, lots of pills and I went 5-6 months this route with little success and lots of discomfort. My blood pressure had escalated and the VA's treatment was simply more meds until I was on a total of 13. Then I got gout. No one in my family has gout. One of my meds specifically claimed to increase the chances of getting the horrible malady. The VA's answer was yet more drugs. I again voluntarily stopped all of them except 2 blood pressure meds and sat it out cold turkey for two weeks. My next visit to the VA appeared that everything had returned to normal except my blood pressure which to this day has stayed dangerously high.

My big break - no pun intended - came when I asked for alternative treatment and began a twice a week acupuncture treatment at Fusion Acupuncture & Holistic Healthcare in Houston. I got immediate relief after the first visit and it was at this point that I began to scrutinize my medicine. I evolved into chiropractic and after 3 months of this, I am fairly back to normal physically.

I have 5 more appointments at the VA between now and June so they can aggressively solve this BP problem and until they do, I cannot push myself at the gym or instruct the class that I love. So, I've fallen off the horse and this horse requires a lot more than simply sitting. It took me over 2 years of constant riding to get in shape to instruct a class on the level members deserve. Can I get back on? I guess its up to me, but hasn't it always been?

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