At 21 I was in a motorcycle accident that ended my time in contact sports. What I did not know until decades later was that it had left me with no ACL — a diagnosis I would not receive until 2015, almost 24 years after the original 1991 injury.
After the knee surgery and a re-injury in 2017, I had to find ways to keep moving that did not require a functioning ACL, a running track, or a gym membership that assumed I could move like everyone else.
What worked: yoga, walking, sand, and golf. Specifically — walking an uneven course, carrying my own bag, setting a pace, and doing it consistently. The uneven ground is similar to sand. It forces small stabilizing movements without the impact of pavement running. You can go hard or easy. You can compete with yourself. And you can do it with people you love.
Leslie and I would drop Troy off at school and go straight to the public golf course on a weekday. We discovered we could run the full course with our own bags in under an hour. We did that three days a week instead of running. It kept me going.
I built this system because nobody should need 40 years of trial and error to find what their body can do — and what keeps it moving safely.