“With all this keeping my chin up and trying to enjoy the prospect of having my first vacation in a decade you might think I’m OK with the situation. I’m not.”



(Editor’s note: In early February, US National Short Track Champion and Giant MTB Pro Adam Craig suffered a knee injury that is going to keep him out of action for several weeks. If you’ve read any of AC’s blogs, you know that “action” is very important to him. Here he writes about beginning rehab to get back to competition.)

Well, do you want the good news or the bad news? The good news is that they didn’t have to amputate. The bad news is that ACL Surgery isn’t exactly a simple procedure and therefore takes a while to recover completely from.

Finally, after all these years of doing marginally safe activities outside, I had one go wrong and got my due. Unfortunately, there’s no cool story of an Avalanche sweeping me over a cliff or Kurt Sorge teaching me how to land a back flip on the mulch pile. Nope, the aforementioned activity was a brisk walk across a slick parking lot here in Bend… Awesome. I’m still kind of hesitant to fully acknowledge the fact that I’ve survived the last 20 years of shredding just to do myself in daily life. I always kind of knew that would be the way though, Mrs. Edgar knows how impossible it is for me to feed myself without being a total klutz so at least she won’t be surprised.

Now that I’m two weeks out from surgery it’s all starting to sink in. This is not just a sh*t-storm. This is a veritable sh*t-i-cane; a really hard one to accept and understand. You see, I’ve just started to walk around the house on my own two feet without the aid of my lovely Lofstrand (think Forrest Gump) crutches and can spin complete (albeit slow) circles on the stationary bike. Yet, with all of this progress and a knee that appears, other than a bit of swelling and some incisions, to be healthy, I’m looking at not being able to ride a mountain bike in any remotely risky environment for four months from the date of surgery, February 9th. The problem is that, even though I should be road riding in the next week or so, the new Ligament will continue to weaken until about 16 weeks from surgery.

After the MRI diagnosing my obviously exploded Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL), I was given two options by my surgeon, Dr. Ryan. Option A (and his recommendation) would be to go with the Cadaver Allograft. Plan B is a tendon graft from my own hamstring or patella. After reviewing the pros and cons of each I took his recommendation and, five days after the diagnosis, a few portals were drilled in a few large bones in my leg and the donor tendon was installed with absorbable screws. Gnarly. On that day my body’s task of taking this flash-frozen cadaver tendon tissue and using it as scaffolding to re-grow a new Ligament began. This is a long process, one that’s really easy to completely negate by screwing up even one time. The body slowly removes tissue from the tendon graft (which is obviously dead) and replaces it as slightly different ligament tissue. At about sixteen weeks you can start to count on the new ligament tissue being in the majority and able to support a bit of a load as it was originally intended. The concern during this transformation period is that even a small, imperceptible stretch of the graft will result in a ligament that doesn’t really do its job. 2-4mm of play between the tibia and femur is the normal range and anything beyond 6mm will result in gradually thrashing the rest of your knee and walking like Travis Pastrana for the rest of your life, or having further surgery. Not an option for me. The other half of the timeline is that after the trauma of a multi-hour surgery and holes drilled in bone your body completely shuts down the muscles in the affected leg. Even with quad contractions and ankle rolls, in a few short days the musculature atrophies to about 20% of its original strength. Amazing. In a normal recovery timeline the patient is at about 70-80% of strength by the 16-week milestone. I aim to improve on this but it’s kind of irrelevant, one slip while racing with a leg that’s weak anyway and I’ll be back to the drawing board. This sucks.

So, I wait. While I’m waiting I also happen to be working my ass off. Physical Therapy with my good buddy and structural genius Timmy Evens happens on a daily basis. Timmy knows my structure and is aiming to rebuild me better than I was when this whole thing started. I’m excited about that prospect and can’t wait to start implementing it on the bike. In between doing (at this point) very basic exercises, I’m trying successfully to avoid drinking beer and eating ice cream while watching TV and instead learning new salad recipes and staying hydrated. It’s kind of reminding me that I like having things to focus on rather than existing day to day. At least there’s daily progress at this point. I hear things plateau at about a month when you appear to be back to normal but still have a ticking bomb in your knee. We’ll see how that goes. Hopefully riding my road bike all day every day will give me enough to focus on at that point. And doing fun projects around the house that never get done in this recreational ADD lifestyle…

With all this keeping my chin up and trying to enjoy the prospect of having my first vacation in a decade you might think I’m OK with the situation. I’m not. Now that the timeline is a bit clearer it only takes a few minutes of reflection to consider all of the people who have supported me and have stake in my career and existence and are getting screwed over by my momentary loss of focus. From Giant Bicycles and our co-sponsors who set up a new Rabobank MTB team in Europe giving me top-notch support at the World Cup level, to USA Cycling who has counted on me being the #1 UCI ranked rider for the last 5 years and us being on the bubble for three Olympic start spots. Even beyond the big fish there are little things like Fox Racing Shox needing me to test new XC fork technology this winter or Shimano using me for a product launch at Sea Otter. The Oregon Super D series coordinator, Brandon Ontiveros, set up the schedule for this (AWESOME) inaugural series to work around my XC racing commitments so I could come out and shred. This is a full time job for me and it requires use of my lower extremities. I’ve gone and taken out said extremities and have let a lot of people down in the process. Letting myself down trails distantly behind my responsibilities, which I hold in the highest esteem. Like I said, this is a sh*t-i-cane and we’ll leave it at that.

To that end I’m trying my best to fix this as quickly as possible. Searching out alternative treatments like acupuncture and being in touch with the USOC sports medicine department to determine if there are any experimental treatment options available that might help my unique situation. It’s good to have a project I suppose…

This was slated to be a busy winter but I’ve already missed two events that I was looking forward to, the Rabobank Team Launch in Holland last week being the most important. A bit closer to home was dropping Carl and his Dad off at the airport yesterday for their flight to the 100 Acre Wood Rally race in Missouri. We got Carl a good co-driver and he’ll probably be better off anyway…

This trend of missing events is going to be frustrating for me to say the least, and a bit detrimental once you start thinking about the World Cup season kickoff at the end of April (not June) and other UCI events that I really need to be at. Good thing World Champs are at my beloved Mont St. Anne; I’m already getting fired up about turning a third or fourth row start into a medal. And I damn well better if I want people to forget about this little hiccup…

My deepest apologies to everyone for blowing it – “it” being my knee.