I had been living with my family in France as COVID was starting to spiral out of control in Europe. I said to my wife that maybe they should come back to the States with me because I was worried about getting separated.
I was clipped from behind, and my leg got caught between my opponent's legs. As we fell, my leg snapped. It was a spiral fracture. They had to put in a plate and five screws. It was a devastating moment: one minute I was on cloud nine, and then I was out for the season.
When I see a room full of people pedaling away on stationary bikes, I fall into an existential spiral. It's confirmation that all we do as humans is pedal, pedal, pedal, and go nowhere. We're just specks of dust in the universe, riding 1970s stationary bicycles.
If you bend a branch until it's horizontal, the sap will slow to a stopping point: a comma or colon, made of leaves grown into one another and over one another and hardened. Out of this pause comes a flower, which unfolds itself in spirals, as if the leaf form, unable to keep to its line, had begun to pivot.
You change the mind and world of one individual and that's huge, man. You reach one person and that starts a spiral effect and starts to snowball. I think that's the one thing as an athlete we should all focus on doing and that's striving to give back in a positive manner.
At Girl Scouts, we are committed to raising awareness about the terrible effects of cyber bullying, and to teaching girls how to recognize the signs of bullying of any sort and extricate themselves or another from a bad situation before it spirals out of control and ends in tragedy.
Fear stifles our thinking and actions. It creates indecisiveness that results in stagnation. I have known talented people who procrastinate indefinitely rather than risk failure. Lost opportunities cause erosion of confidence, and the downward spiral begins.
When I was a critic, I reviewed Public Enemy's 'Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age' - this is back in '94 - and I called it a 'Dante-esque spiral of the hip-hop hell.' I idolized Chuck D, but I just hated that record, and I did not hold back. Chuck didn't freeze me out. Every time I met Chuck, he always treated me with the utmost respect.