For those who might be reading this and aren’t familiar with your story, let people know when you talk about where you’re at and this point, you are back walking. You still are recovering, but not only are you riding a motorcycle again; you’re walking, using chainsaws and kind of sort of living a little bit of the life you were living prior to this.
So the biggest issue aside from obviously anytime you damage your spinal cord there’s going to be things that you just are going to have to deal with for life, for myself obviously there’s going to be a lack of range of movement in my neck forever because it’s fused from C3 to C7. I will never get that movement back. Aside from that there is going to be muscle spasticity, which is almost like having a full-body cramp, or it forces your body with severe, like the worst cramping pain and inability to move. Every morning when I get up, my body kind of goes into spasms. Then if I sit for too long and I get up it’ll do the same thing. Or if I use any one muscle, especially my arms and hands, for too long then they kind of just seize up and lock up. The muscles just kind of cut out.

That’s what you want to have while you’re about to use a chainsaw, right?
[Laughs] I kind of pushed the envelope on recovery as far as “safe” versions of therapy. But to be honest, I really think it’s all these crazy things that I’m doing for therapy, and also that I’m just putting myself back into that situation. Those situations are why some of the things are starting to come back, and these connections are being able to be re-firing. I did everything I could at therapy through as long as my hospital visits lasted, and then even continued my home program. It wasn’t until I made myself get back on a bike that the connection from my brain to my hands and to my triceps and pecs actually started happening, for one at all, and then started doing it with more consistency. It’s more, I’d say, dependable on when I send a message from my brain. More times than not, it’s starting to get to the spots that it didn’t get to before which was namely my hands, fingers, arms, and chest. I really think it’s putting myself back on the bike. Whether it’s the vibrations of the bike or just the muscle memory or whatever it is, it’s really started to re-fire these connections that none of my therapists—we couldn’t find a way to make it happen, outside of darn two-wheel therapy. 

Basically, with that too is your mental status, your mindset. I have to imagine you’re happier and more motivated to go out and try and cut down some brush or do outdoor things versus sit inside a therapy gym.
Oh, yeah. Actually until you brought that up, that actually kind of triggered something I’ve noticed. Since I have been outside and doing my own thing, more to speak, I just go for so much longer. I think at therapy—I know they had reasons why they would only have it for a certain amount of time, but back when I was in therapy in the hospital I just wanted to keep going. Is there a record here? What’s the record for longest “this?” What’s the record on “this?” What can I do here? Then they’d be having to kick me out of the gym and stuff. So now that I’m doing my own things that I am more passionate about and I just have more desire to keep pushing, I think that’s why instead of kind of getting stagnant and plateauing off in my recovery after therapy, I think I’ve actually started ramping it up and going even more so. I think you’re actually right. It’s because of all the passion behind it now, instead of just going through the motions that the therapists give me, which I did and I did it as hard as I could. But now I have more potential to go longer, further, and with more passion behind it.

Do you still have days where your body is like, “You’ve been pushing it really hard all week—we need a little bit of rest?” When you go to bed at night, do you rest all through the night and you wake up ready to go the next day? Or do you have days where you’re like, man, I need to just kind of chill a little bit today.
No, there’s definitely those days. I like to push my body, especially arms, until I just really can’t use them anymore that day. No matter what, I already know that in the mornings it’s going to be a slow, hard to get moving start, just because that’s the way my body is now in the morning. Like I said, the spasms are worse. Everything’s tighter. Everything’s just worse in the morning. I know it’s going to be like that. So I push myself as much as my body can go. Not every single day, because that would be just crazy, but as many days as possible. I’m constantly just going until my body can’t go, and then knowing that the next morning is going to suck because it’s going to suck regardless of if I push it hard or not, so I might as well push it.

How do you bring yourself to push through the “dark days,” where your body feels like, no, I can’t do this, but mentally you’re like, I have to do this? What do you use as a motivation to just do it?
At first to be honest, the only thing that was motivating me or the main thing that was motivating me to keep going that hard, was the daily videos. For whatever reason, they gave me something to work for, something to be creative. I think that my darkest days were on the days that I was the least creative. Every day hurts and every day sucks and I’m going to just live with this pain forever. I know that. But it was the lack of creativity that would make me stay darker for longer throughout the day. It wasn’t until I focused on, “I need to do my daily video today,” and I needed to create this thing and this video, whatever it happened to be, and it was when those creative juices got flowing that it was where I was able to find positivity again. I know it always seems like it online, and I do try and motivate and keep people positive with my videos, but some days it would be that video is the only positive part in that day and the only time I practically had a smile that day, or whatever it may be. I found out that recently it wasn’t the act of what I was doing in the videos. It was creating something and having my creativity flow. I used to express that through my riding and through my snow skating and through all that stuff, so when I couldn’t do that, it was a mental block. So when I would do those videos every day it would get those creative juices flowing, and that was super motivating. I found out after doing them for so long that that’s what it was. Then I knew like, “Okay, no matter what the day is, I’m going to create something out of this day,” and that happened to be the daily videos.

More or less, you’re kind of tricking your brain to focus on creating something as to worry about being injured, right?
Yeah. It’s a good, positive distraction. Also, I think having that creativity flowing, it’s making your brain fire in ways that just sitting there being bummed and watching TV in the hospital—which is usually what you do in the hospital—it makes your brain actually stay active. I think for spinal patients especially, spinal cord injuries, what you need to do is make your brain fire in as many different ways as you possibly can to try and wake up these connections. So I really give a lot of my recovery to that actually. Like you said, it was really good to keep your mind off of the obvious, “Hey, my life is forever different.” So it was a really good distraction for that.

Let’s talk about your support system a little bit. I know your family and your friends and everyone around you keeps you going. Was there ever any resistance at all when you were like, “I think I’m going to go out and use the weed eater today, or I’m going to go out and do this?” Or was it always like, “Do what you can, but be mindful of what you’re doing?”
Definitely from my close family, and actually, I guess it’s been a pretty crazy recovery because some of the things I did even [Travis] Pastrana himself said, “Hey, man, you’re pretty crazy for trying that in this condition.” But like I said earlier, I think it was those wild forms of therapy that I chose that helped get me where I am. For the most part, it was really supportive. Any time I had a crazy idea to do something, Sarah [Whitmore, Phil's wife] of course would be fully backing me because she knows that I know what I can do. I can’t even say that, really, because some of the things, I didn’t know exactly how it was going to go my first time riding or doing this or doing that. So, there was a little bit of a wing and a prayer on some of those things. I know that some of my family didn’t necessarily like to see me get back into the swing of things so quickly. But I feel the longer I wait on things, the longer they’re going to take to come back and the less likely they are to return to anything normal for me. For the most part, super supportive everyone. Then when you have a support group initially, all the Nitro Circus guys were there during the crash, so I had just nothing but positivity surrounding me. So I really didn’t have much of a choice but to be positive. Then by the time Sarah got there and back when the crash first happened, I just was really surrounded with a bunch of positive people that they didn’t give me the option to go down this super dark path that everything in my mind wanted to do. I have to just give a huge shout out to all the people that I had around me, yourself included. When you have that much support around you, it’s like you’re almost racing for a team. You’re going to push as hard as you can because you want to get better for the friends and family around you. It was a huge part of it, for sure.

What was more of an “Oh, shit, this could be bad?” moment, your first time getting back on a dirt bike or your first time getting back on a snow skate?
The funny thing about that is the snow skate definitely should be sketchier, but for me and my level of injury, the C5 was the one that really messed the cord up. That controls your arms and hands more so than your legs. So although it was dinged up enough to paralyze the body, really my legs bounced back faster than my arms did. For me, getting on the snow skate first and the fact that by the time I was moving around kind of again, it was going into winter, the timing was right and my legs were way, way, way stronger than my arms and functioning better. I thought that it was inside me. That’s the crazy part on that one, because I literally just went for it. I stood on the skate and I started going to the hill. I’m like, “Man, I sure hope I still know how to do this.” I thought I could, but there was nothing saying for sure, “Yes, I’m going to be able to do this.” So that was the first thing that I really just went for it. It worked out so well that I was almost in tears that day, just laughing my butt off. It was the best time I ever had at a ski hill. That kind of set the tone for, “I’m going to jump on a bike and try this again. If I can’t do it, then I’ll keep working until I can do it.” So, for me, being on the snow skate was a million times more stable than on a bike because just what you have to control with your arms on the bike, I can’t count on my arms to do what I tell them to do yet. The bikes are still sketchy for me, but I’m spending some time on them now, thankfully, and trying to smooth that out a little bit. I’m still way better on a skate now than I am on a bike, that’s for sure.

That statement is crazy to me personally because I’ve seen you when you couldn’t walk from a chair to the bathroom, and how wobbly you were on your legs and stuff.
That one was definitely the first really huge, super uplifting, life-altering milestone that I hit. So I think that was really big. Then also it really helped me too because when I found out that I could do that, and at this point my arms were so far from… I had no feeling in my hand either. I’d put my hands on the handlebars and I could just not feel any connection with the bike. My arms were so far from ever being, I thought, able to work again, that being able to ride that snow skate down the hill, emotionally it lifted me up so much and it got me so pumped. I was like, “Well, if I can never ride again and if the arms don’t come back like they say they won’t come back, then I can always chase the snow and I can fuel my passion and pursue something on the board.” So that was really a huge moment.