Unhip

H minus 97 Pam and I finish the Bolder Boulder 10K! "And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?"  - Talking Heads The hip has been bothering me for a few years now. Dull ache to sometimes a bit of sharp pain. An x-ray last January revealed significant loss of cartilage. I got a cortisone injection and all was good til May. In May Pam and I ran the Bolder Boulder 10K together. Well, jog-walked, I set a timer on my watch and we did 1 minute jog, 2 minutes walking for the entire race. We finished it in 1:52, not bad for a couple of 60-somethings. I mean I take exercise classes from a coach who's a month younger than me and runs ultramarathons, so that'd be a terrible time for him, but for us it's a serious accomplishment. The next day, my hip hurt. Then It hurt worse. I mean get-in-the-way-of-walking kind of hurt. I went to the doctor, and they tried PRP (Platelet Rich Plasma) to plump up the remaining cartilage. That's the kind of treatment where it fee...

San Antonio Riverwalk  H minus 100 Weekend getaway to San Antonio, TX.  Why San Antonio? Well, ostensibly we wanted to see the Spurs play in their home court. We bought tickets to a preseason game, Spurs vs the Sacramento Kings. It was a heck of a game! The Kings scored the first basket, then the Spurs took the lead and kept widening it and widening it. At the end of the first quarter, they were a point shy of a 3x lead!  I said "ostensibly". We love to use basketball as an excuse for travel. We enjoy the games, but it also gives us an insight into a city's culture. The basketball fan culture in San Antonio is different from Denver which is different from LA when we took off to see a Clippers game. In San Antonio it felt more like a state fair kind of crowd. People were hanging out in the "Fan Zones", the food, bar, and merch sections of the stadium. People were friendly and almost everyone had a story about a relative living in Colorado....

Aspens above Breckenridge  H Minus102 I include some Fitbit app screenshots at the end of this entry to show I'm still walking, even with a cane.  A couple of weekends ago, we went to Dillon and Breckenridge to look at the aspens. Saturday, we hiked up the Lily Pad Lake trail, and Sunday we hiked down and back up the Aspen Alley trail. We were about a week past peak aspens but it was still as spectacular as you could wish.  Now with the cane I'm tripedal after a fashion. On the steeper downhill stretches (not very steep), I had a bit of fun letting gravity assist. I'd build up a head of steam loping asymmetrically down the slope using the cane to guide, absorb shock for the left hip, and give a bit of elevation for an extended stride/leap for the right leg. Then I'd let my momentum carry me a little way up the next slope or turn into the undergrowth beside the trail to slow down. On the steeper uphill sections I discovered a hill climbing gear. I planted the...

H minus 104  Just a few weeks ago I started walking with a cane. The way it happened: Pam and I visited California in September. I had a three-day summit at work in Sunnyvale, and Pam came along. Then for the weekend, we went to Half Moon Bay and stayed at a bed and breakfast on the beach. We had a really nice time! Walking around with Pam in the evenings during the summit, Pam noticed how much I was struggling with my hip. I've always had a quick walking pace, and when I'm not thinking about it, tend to accelerate ahead of other people with me. Yet lately, I've been lagging behind Pam. It took real effort to keep up, and apparently I was not particularly quiet about it.  When we got to Half Moon Bay, we stopped at the CVS, and I was told in no uncertain terms to pick out a cane (Note: you need someone like Pam in your life to love you, support you, and above all keep you honest). I spent the weekend adjusting to walking with a cane.  Did I say "adjusting"? I took...

H minus 105 This blog is about my countdown to total hip arthroplasty (hip replacement surgery) and about my recovery afterwards.  To explain a bit about why, I'll include a couple of details from my latest x-rays, Sept 7, 2026: Right hip - standing : Notice there's a pretty reasonable gap between the ball and the socket, meaning that the cartilage is in pretty good shape for a male of <age redacted for vanity>.  Left hip - standing : To quote my father when describing something missing: "There ain't no there there." Look at the remarkable lack of space for cartilage. That's because there isn't any. Now why isn't there any cartilage in this joint? Honestly, I don't know. My body just doesn't like its own cartilage and dissolves it. I've already had one shoulder replaced, and the other one is bone on bone as well. As one orthopedist said, my joints "don't look so good - for a 97-year-old."  Now for the shoulders, I had th...