Bet On Yourself

"Everyone has secrets. I'm a huge gamer. Oh yeah, him too. Sometimes we play online together."

"Jake invests in Pokemon cards."

"How 'bout you Fuecker? Got any secrets?"

"Ha. If I told ya you wouldn't even believe me."

"Try us"

"I had full blown hip surgery about 10 months ago."

"Holy shit. What?"

"Yep. Got the scars to prove it."

And that's pretty much how the biggest secret I've ever held was discovered, er found out. However ya wanna put it. Somewhere on the Six Rivers National Forest in MiddleOfNowhere California. I think we were on day 5 of our roll. The fire was pretty much dead on the piece of ground that we were monitoring. I broke off ahead of my squad with our Saw Boss and started stomping up the powdered moon dust of a dozer line that was put in days ago. We were each walking about 100 feet interior or so looking for hot spots and heat to mop up so we could call it secure. We were more or less bullshitting our way up. As you do while trying to make the best of the assignment at hand, as your legs are on fire, your lungs try to clean out the ashy air you're kicking up, and your 6-day-old-dirty clothes are saturated again from sweating profusely for 16 hours of the day in the 100+ degree sunlight. It's a hard knock life I guess. Okay, it sounds like I'm complaining, I'm not. These aren't exactly the days hotshots live for, but we tend to find a way to make any task as "fun" as we can. I'm just trying to paint a picture... is it working? Anyway, about halfway up this hill to the top of the earth, we come across the overhead of our crew, our Superintendent and our Captains. They too are doing what we all seem to do best; bullshitting amongst themselves. My Saw Boss and I decide to wander over their way and join in on the festivities. A bit unlike me, I stay quiet, knowing where this conversation might go. I listen to these guys spill secrets and tell some funny stories for a while before I'm probed into the conversation... "How 'bout you Fuecker? Got any secrets?" And so I thought for a few seconds and decided that it was probably a safe time to fill them in on the secret that I had been keeping from them for the past 9 months. The secret that consumed my entire off-season prior to being hired on with the Wyoming Hotshots.

In late October of 2021 I had a hip surgery that involved a few incisions, some reshaping of some bones, and a little, er a lot of sewing up on a shredded labrum. I mean, it had been something I was dealing with and progressively making worse, apparently, since I was 18. Regardless to say, I was laid up for a while. Not being able to walk, or put weight on it, or even drive anywhere for a few weeks. The first few weeks were tough, humbling, and pretty eye opening. As much as I hated it, I needed help with very mundane things. It was a task to go to the bathroom, it was a task to get into bed, it was a task to go from place to place. All the things I usually spent time doing, I couldn't do. No gym, no hot tub, no running, no walking in the woods, no saw work, no hiking, no going bowling (not that I did much before, but I definitely couldn't now lol). But once I could drive, I did whatever I could. Or attempted to at least. I started going to the gym to do arms and whatever else I could. I went grocery shopping. Although I did find it hard to shop and carry groceries while on crutches. Defeated, I crutched my sorry ass on over to the grocery cruiser-mobiles. They went 10x slower than I could walk. Passed an item a few feet back? Hold on let me throw this thing in reverse and "beep beep beep" my way back there. Begrudgingly, I went on about my shopping and got out of there as quickly as I could. Oh, and forget about getting all the groceries from the truck to the kitchen in one trip. How bout one trip for every bag. Each task took at least twice as long. My days went by pretty slow, but each moment was still pretty filled. On top of the extended time for mundane tasks, each day I had to spend about 2 hours in a constant passive movement machine, increasing the angle that it brought my leg and hip to each day, for about 6 weeks, morning and night. I soon started physical therapy. At first it wasn't much, very simple workouts to establish a base. Over time, the workouts became more intense and I was pushed a little further each week, carefully toeing the line of soreness and pain. Luckily I had some pretty good physical therapists to help me along and challenge me just enough. Pretty sure I left with my shirt soaked in sweat every time. Nice. Even got to a point where I was challenging my therapist to do my therapy workout for her own workout. She came back the next week and admitted to struggling through it. "Told ya it ain't so easy!"

Rewind to early 2021 real quick for a reality check. I knew full well that I would have a very short window to have the operation and get healthy again for the upcoming fire season. My surgeon told me that my recovery time was going to be close to six months. Six months! Six months to return to full, unrestricted activity. Six months to be in good enough shape to hike up any hill in front of me, figuratively and literally. It was a tough push and tight window. I knew that I had to do everything I could possibly do to speed the process along as much as I could. I had to push the envelope on the healing process enough to speed it up, but not too much to re-injure myself or slow the process down. So I planned. I did research. What's the usual cause of pain? Inflammation. What has an impact on inflammation? Turns out, a lot. I developed some very necessary habits. Icing was one. Stretching another. But a big one was my diet. I changed my diet drastically and went on an anti-inflammatory diet. No fried foods, extra sugars, nothing with bleached flour, and no alcohol. I started to supplement with more vitamin D, turmeric, glucosamine and chondroitin for any edge I could get on joint health. Ultimately, I bet on myself. 

I swore I would do what I could, by all means necessary. So I did. I knew that I would be pretty sick and tired of the monotony of training and getting healthy after a while. So I planned for that too. I decided that if I was gonna be stuck training my ass off just to get in shape enough to be capable of doing my job, I might as well train somewhere nice. So I flew down to the Virgin Islands for the month of February. I brought my resistance bands and made do with what I had when I got there and stuck to my regimen. Man, my mood was a lifted quite a bit doing those lunges on a balcony overlooking the bay of Charlotte Amalie in the warm morning glow of the sunrise. My runs seemed to be a little better when it was along the western coast of St. Croix as the sun was setting over the ocean versus a treadmill at the local YMCA. I couldn't complain too much. Good thinking Zach.

 By the time I was leaving for the first week of Critical 80 with Wyoming I felt as though I was in a pretty good spot. Well, I was in as good of a spot as I could be, considering what I had just undergone in the past few months. I went in to day one as nervous as everyone else, but I completed it. Of course, getting a lil hypoglycemic wasn't in the plans. But a little bit of trail mix slipped to me by a crew member fixed that after a while. Nonetheless, the hip felt fine. I soon completed training, and then a couple rolls, and then the season. I felt great the whole way. Without hubris, I chalk it up to betting on myself. I hate that I had to omit some truth to my supervisors about my health in the off-season during our fitness check-ins, but I'da been damned if I was gonna let that stop me from getting on the crew. That was my thought. Leave it all on the line. If I don't make it up the hill on day one of Criticals, then I guess I'm not supposed to be a hotshot. It would have been one hell of an awful way to find out, but that's what it was gonna come down to. With a little training, a little determination, and a lotta help from the big man upstairs, I never had to experience what "not making it" felt like. And I'm grateful for that.

I guess my message is in the post title: bet on yourself. Don't count yourself out. There's a way to achieve what you want. It might take a little figuring out, it might take a little time, it might take a little pain, it might take a set back first. One thing I've always heard is that things seem to get worse before they get better. That definitely was the case for me in this scenario. Keep that in mind in your own life. Use that one old cliche-sounding phrase. "Minor setback for a major comeback" or somethin' like that. Bet on yourself, not against yourself. Then do all the little things that you have to do in order to accomplish the big thing in your crosshairs. We'll get there. Just keep livin'.