out. As he describes it, she essentially gave
him a verbal backhand. She was angry
he’d even gone there. “This doesn’t even
faze me,” she told him. “We’re doing this
together.”
Paul left the hospital in a wheelchair.
The months that followed were dark,
despite the support of fans, friends,
and family, and sponsors like Scott that
donated bikes for fundraisers to help cover
his skyrocketing medical bills.
Paul was not comfortable seeing people,
being seen, looking up at them from his
wheelchair. He just wanted to be left alone.
Nichole would come home from work and
the curtains would be drawn and Paul
would be sitting in the dark. “You could
feel the sadness,” she remembers. She’d
rush around, opening the curtains, letting
daylight f lood in. She’d say, “Baby, you can’t
be like this.”
But Paul was also a guy who had gotten
up again and again from gnarly crashes
and concussions and cracked bike frames
to accomplish feats previously considered
impossible. So, even in his despair, he was
determined to walk again. He read every-
thing he could about spinal cord injuries. He
attacked his recovery with the same level of
intensity that he’d had when he was trying
to nail a new trick. The former trophy room
in the front hallway of his house filled with
free weights, resistance bands, a vibration
trainer that he’d stand on to strengthen
his leg muscles.
Six hours a day, Paul worked to regain
his ability to walk. He turned off his phone
and trained and stared at the prize checks
on the wall for motivation. He went to
PT, where he scooched up and down the
parallel bars and did knee squats and other
bodyweight exercises. He went to acupunc-
ture twice a week. All this was much more
than what the doctors had advised him to
do, which was just to try to “send signals
down to those toes.” In fact, the more Paul
tried to learn about how to recover from
his injury, the more he realized that there
was very little helpful information about
what he should be doing, what progress he
could hope for and when.
The work started paying off. Paul built
enough strength to lift himself out of his
wheelchair, hold the railings of his stair-
case, and lift a foot onto a step. About sixmonths in, he took his first steps with a walker. His feet dragged,
sometimes lurched. But he was able to walk out of his garage,
onto his street, into the sunshine. Around month eight, he went
from the walker to forearm crutches, then quickly progressed to
two canes. This was when he felt comfortable leaving the house
again, seeing people. Shortly after that, he was able to drive. That
was a huge milestone.
Paul started visiting other people who had just sustained spinal
cord injuries. Friends who worked at the local hospital would let
him know when an SCI patient came in, or their family members
would reach out to him on social media. Paul would walk in on
his forearm crutches and he could see that it gave people hope.
He would tell them his story, listen to theirs, and share what he
had learned so far.
Paul met people who were in much worse situations than him:
quadriplegics, people with complete SCIs, people who had passed
the two-year mark—during which the most progress is typically
made—and were still in wheelchairs. Seeing their struggles brought
him perspective on his own injury.
And it lit a fire in him. He got an idea.
Using his GoPro and DSLR camera, Paul had actually been
filming his recovery since week one in the hospital. The project
had begun out of boredom, but now he thought, what if he made
a film about his experience—one that would raise awareness
about spinal cord injuries? About nine months after his crash, he
approached Red Bull Media House.
Paul was a private person, not the type to share much on
social media or articulate deep emotion. But when Red Bull
green-lighted the documentary and it was time to hand over
his footage, he held nothing back. In fact, when film director
Fernando Villena began reviewing it, he initially found some of
it so raw that he wasn’t sure what to do with it. The crash clip
from Paul’s GoPro on the day of Rampage shook him. “Just being
in that first-person view of somebody at the moment their life
changes...I was like, how are we going to ever use this material?
It’s just too graphic,” he says.
Then he got to what’s now known as the infamous “catheter
scene,” which Paul filmed at 3 a.m. just days after his injury, nude
in front of the toilet.
“I was like, that is never going in the movie,” Fernando recalls.
“[It] was so traumatic to watch. It took him eight minutes.”
When he got to the part that Paul filmed while getting his
staples taken out from the surgery, Paul said into the camera,
“Hopefully I can be the guidance for someone else.” And suddenly,
it clicked. “I realized what he wanted to do was leave a record of
what someone goes through in this situation,” says Fernando. “So
we need to show all of it.”
The documentary, Any One of Us, ended up featuring not only
Paul’s experience, but those of 17 other people living with SCI.
Paul became friends with several of these cast members, and
others in the SCI community, like Eric Howk, guitarist for the
band Portugal. The Man.
For most of his life, Paul had surrounded himself with profes-
sional athletes, other people who were also fixated on winning
contests or races. Suddenly, he was building a new crowd andMOUNTAINROAD/GRAVELTOWNAN E-BIKE
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a kickstand, a rack, and a rear light.76 BICYCLING.COM • ISSUE 5
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