Interview: Jason Pridmore
By Chris Jonnum
Photos by Andrew Northcott
www.ajrn.com

We had been planning a story with Jason Pridmore for the July/August issue of Road Racer X, but when the Jordan Suzuki rider suffered serious injuries in a practice crash at Barber Motorsports Park on May 24, those plans pretty much went out the window. Pridmore had ruptured his spleen, lacerated a kidney, and lost a lot of blood, and he actually came within about a half-hour of dying. Pridmore’s early recovery has been nothing short of amazing, though, as the Californian flew home on Friday, April 29, just five days after the crash. That being the case, we decided to see if Pridmore was up for a brief interview, and he gave us a call last Thursday. Although he was obviously still rather disheartened about the turn of events, Jason proceeded to talk our ear off for nearly 20 minutes.

RRX: Jason, how are you feeling?
Jason Pridmore: Doing better now that I’m home. You always go through a tough four, five days when you first come home from the hospital. That’s kind of what I’ve been doing—just getting used to dealing with a lot of stomach pain. But it’s starting to dissipate and go away, and my body’s starting to recover pretty quickly.

What happened, exactly?
The things that I remember from that morning are, I remember Aaron Gobert and I kind of waving to each other on our out-lap, going down the back straightaway. He’s one of the few guys that I go out and ride around and practice with, and I remember I was following him around. Then John Haner got in between us, and John didn’t know I was behind him. I thought, Well, I’m just going to go by John going onto the front straightaway if I can, and I tried to cut it back a little tighter on the exit, coming onto the front straightaway. Apparently I had a little too much throttle when I was cutting it back, and it just ended up kind of spitting me over the top. I landed flat on my stomach and my head. It just didn’t seem as bad as it was, but I remember the second that I stood up, I had a weird pain in my stomach. It wasn’t like I had the wind knocked out of me; I just had a very odd feeling in my stomach, and that’s when I was a little nervous about the whole thing. Something felt kind of peculiar.

You had already hit your head earlier in the weekend, right?
I hit my head the first day, but I didn’t lose consciousness. I was okay, and the first one, I can honestly say didn’t relate to the second one in any way.… Yeah, Alabama wasn’t a good week for me [laughs]. We struggled a little bit there in testing, and come race time, we really started to get more on the pace. We were sorting out our Superbike a bit, so I was excited about that. And we were sorting out our Superstock bike to where it felt like we had a really good package for that afternoon. Then I went out and spoiled it by jumping off the thing in that session.

I understand that initially, the track doctors didn’t think you were badly injured.
Yeah, the funny thing about me is, I tend to treat a lot of things with humor. I pretty much told them that there’s no broken bones, but I was pretty adamant that there was still something wrong with me. I knew something wasn’t right. Maybe it’s because I’ve gone to the hospital a few times. You get to know your body pretty well as an athlete, and I knew there was something wrong with me. I don’t think they were really serious about it, because I had come in there kind of with the attitude of, “Hey, I don’t think there’s any broken bones, but I still think there might be something wrong.” They just didn’t take me very seriously about the idea that there was something wrong, even though I knew that there was something not right. It’s a big lesson to the kids who are out there who think that, at the end of the day, racing is not all there is. You have to take care of your body, and when you think that there’s something wrong, it doesn’t hurt to go get it checked out. You need to go get looked at. I had a couple people there with me who are very important to me, and who were very adamant about getting me to the hospital, because it was almost like [the track doctors] were going to release me and kind of watch me as the day went on. I didn’t think that was a good idea, and neither did the people who were with me.

Is it true that you came close to dying?
I guess it’s a weird question to answer, but yeah. How it was kind of explained to me after the fact was that I sort of had 20 or 30 minutes left. What I really attribute that to is that I was in, by far, the best shape of my life, and what was happening is that even though I had a lot of internal bleeding, my lungs and my heart, and other parts that normally shut down, weren’t shutting down. They were continuing to try to work and produce for me, and that’s what ultimately pretty much saved my life, was the fact that I was in good shape. You hear guys say they’re working out, but I made it a real point this year to get myself into the best shape of my life, and from now on, when I walk into a gym, it’s going to be not only for the reason of getting in shape, but for the reason of knowing what it did for me in this particular case.

Okay, but I also heard that your stomach muscles were actually a problem during surgery.
Yeah, I did a lot of strength-training during the season. By no means am I the biggest or strongest guy out on the circuit [laughs], and I’m sure a lot of the guys would have had the same problems that I had, but what ended up happening is they had to cut through all the abs and the muscles in my stomach, to do the job that they had to do. That created a little bit of extra trauma, and that’s a lot of the pain I’m dealing with now. I’m sure everybody out there has pulled a muscle; well, now they’ve gone and cut through the muscle, and it’s going to take a while for that to heal itself. There’s good and bad, but I’ll take the bad, considering what the alternatives could have been.

What’s this bit about losing so much blood?
Apparently, the body holds five liters, and I had lost three liters of blood. I never lost consciousness the whole time. I almost lost consciousness in the infield care center, where my body started shutting down, and that’s when they jumped on me and realized that I did have a problem, and sort of started taking care of me. The big thing was, as soon as they started putting fluids in me, my body reacted to that. When I really realized I was in a lot of trouble was when I came out of surgery, and I was on a ventilator. It’s a very strange feeling when you’re completely conscious and realize you’re not breathing—[that] a machine is making you breathe. I realized, Hey, I’m on a ventilator. I’ve got tubes stuck down my mouth, my throat, my nose. I can’t talk; I can’t do anything. That was probably when I realized, I’m going to learn more about this and realize that I was probably not in very good shape.

So you never really lost consciousness on your own?
I was conscious up to the point where they put me out for the surgery, yeah. In fact, when it had originally happened, even when they wheeled me into the trauma room, I was still kind of joking with the nurses and stuff, going, “Man, everybody’s awful serious!” I didn’t realize the amount of danger that I was in at that point. When they took me out of the CAT scan, I said, “I have a ruptured spleen, don’t I?” They said, “Yeah, you do; how did you know?” I said, “I’ve heard of this kind of thing, and that’s kind of what I figured.” I was very lucky; I had an unbelievably good doctor. Everybody in that UAB [University of Alabama Birmingham Medical Center] in Birmingham were just unbelievable people—very supportive and understanding of what it was I did for a living. Being motorcycle racers, all of us know what it’s like to go to a hospital and have somebody tell us how crazy we are for doing what we’re doing. I didn’t get that at this place. It was great.

What was the extent of your injuries?
I had a ruptured spleen and a lacerated kidney. With my kidney, there were other concerns there, too, that they had to take care of and look at. We made it through all of that, and my kidneys have healed. I went to the doctor yesterday [Wednesday, May 4]. I had 28 staples holding my stomach together where they stapled me up. They went ahead and took 22 of the 28 staples out of my stomach yesterday. They’re leaving the rest of them in there for precautionary [reasons], just because there’s no rush. We’re going to take our time and take them out in a week.

I talked to Steve and ‘Tez at Fontana, and they said they were surprised at how banged up you were when they went to see you in Alabama.
I hit my head a lot harder the second time, for sure, so I had a lot of issues with remembering certain things. I remember sitting in the infield care center, telling myself, There’s no way that I’m riding today, which was a concern, because I knew when I was telling myself that, that there was something wrong with me. The reason why I think I looked as bad as I did in the ICU is because I was so pumped full of meds that everyone said I looked like I weighed 250 pounds. The medication stuff had me all bloated out and big. I know it was hard for those guys and a lot of my crew to walk in. I appreciated everybody who came in and saw me.

Who all helped you out?
The biggest two guys that I can say were there for us were Mark Gallardo [who runs Pridmore’s Star Motorcycle Schools] and Lincoln James. They’re both like family to me, like brothers, and those two guys for sure were there and have been through this kind of situation with me before. They were very much of the idea of, “Let’s get him where he needs to get to. We need to get him to the hospital right away.” The orthosurgeons at the track only looked at me, like, once, and then they walked off. I don’t even know where they went, but Lincoln and Mark were very adamant in getting me where I needed to go. A lot of my team came to the ICU that night and saw me, which was real nice.

I understand that MJ flew you home on a private jet.
It wasn’t exactly a perk that I wanted to take advantage of this year [laughs], but yeah, MJ sent a plane to Birmingham and made it real comfortable for Mark and Susie and myself to all fly home. It’s no fun traveling when you’re injured, and when you have to walk through an airport, the way I was, I’ll be honest with you—knowing what I know now, I’d have made it home, but it would have been one of the most uncomfortable ordeals that I had ever been through. You’ve got to remember, it’s all around the core of your body, and your stomach is the center of it. You don’t even realize—just getting out of a chair, or any of that stuff, becomes so hard to do anymore. It’s definitely more difficult.

Still, you’ve had an amazingly quick recovery so far, right?
There’s no question. Normally there’s a minimum stay of three days in the ICU, and then after that, it’s seven to 10 days in the hospital. I was looking at almost a two-week stay, and they released me after five days. As a kid, I never smoked, never drank, never did any of that stuff. I’ve been healthy all my life, and I attribute that to being serious about what I wanted to do when I grew up. I stayed away from all that stuff, and I think, in this case, it saved my life. For those young guys who are out there, you’ve got plenty of time the rest of your life, if you want to party and stuff. If you want to treat this seriously, you need to put into it what you want to get out of it.

What’s your prognosis?
I’ve never, ever rushed an injury. I’ve never come back too soon or anything, and I’m treating this the same way. I want to maybe start to do in-the-gym cardio on a bicycle next Monday [May 9], to start building that back up and get my lungs working. I’d like to be back for Pikes [Peak, May 21-22], ultimately, but if I can’t, I’m going to try to be back at Road America [June 4-5]. It will be a good race for me, too, because it’s the closest one to MJ, and he’s going to have a lot of family and friends there. I’m just going to try to get better; that’s the biggest thing I’m going to try to do.

I heard that you might show up at Sears Point on May 14-15?
Yeah, I’d definitely like to go to Sears Point and watch and support the guys and the team. Steve did such a good job for us at Fontana, carrying the flag. [Rapp finished third in Superstock]. I was really pumped for him, and I’m glad to see him get off to a good start of the year. He’s been riding great, and there’s a lot of good things to look forward to as the year goes on. I’ve got an unbelievable team, just great. The guys on our team are amazing. They even all came up here and saw me on Monday [May 2]. They did some work down south, and then they all got in vans and came up and saw me, which I thought was very cool.

Well, I’m glad you seem to be doing so well, considering. Is there anything you’d like to add?
The biggest thing is I just cannot believe the outpouring of kindness from everybody out there. I’ll be honest with you—it’s truly overwhelming. I sat in the hospital a couple nights, just sitting there reading all the e-mails. I just couldn’t believe all these people reached out. From all my students to all my peers who I raced with and against, thanks so much. It’s difficult to be in the situation I was in, but it makes it a lot easier when you know you have the support of so many people out there. I’ve been around this industry a lot of years, and I never would have expected to get that kind of support from people out in the world. I just want to say thanks to everybody out there.

Well, everyone’s sure thinking of you. Keep up the quick recovery, so that we can do a normal story on you in Road Racer X.
Thanks so much, Chris. I appreciate you thinking of me.

Send Pridmore get-well wishes at mail@starmotorcycle.com. Thanks to Jordan Motorsports’ Rich Alexander for helping set up this interview.