Back to the Blog

I've decided to start blogging again because my blog fan (note singular) suggested it would be good to chronicle my comeback from my recent injury. Plus most of my family is not on the book of faces so it saves me from actually having to talk to them... just kidding Mom!

So what recent injury? I broke my elbow in a bike crash in the Deer Trail Road Race on May 16th.
I had surgery to repair it. They put pins in to fix the bones back together, and it's estimated it'll be 6 weeks before I can hit the road again on my bike. I can, however, ride the trainer. I can't tell you how awesome that is to be faced with riding the trainer in May and June after trainering through a bad winter and spring.

After considering blogging all this, I thought it could be therapeutic and help me work through all the ups and downs of coming back from injury especially at this point in my life. The last time I had a major injury was when I broke my collar bone in 2000 or 2001 at the Solano race in California. Back then I was still an enthusiastic bike racer, working my way up the ranks and that was one of my first NRC races so I was super motivated to work my way back that year. I think I raced my bike 4 weeks after that and won my first race by week number 6. But now I'm old, semi-retired (if you can retire from something you don't do professionally), and just hanging on to old glory in the sport. I've done this bike racing thing for 20 years. I'm not trying to get any better at this point; I'm just trying not to get too fat or too slow.

To tell you the truth, before the crash at Deer Trail I was really struggling with motivation for 2010. The weather this spring has been so crummy and I just don't have the drive to ride in crappy weather or trainer like I did 5 or 10 years ago when I was coming up in the sport and "trying to go pro." I was contemplating taking a break in training after Hugo to try to get myself back on track... I got a little more of a "break" than I wanted, and now I need to decide what to do.

Do I work hard, trainer my ass off, and come back strong for the late season races and masters' track nationals? I had planned on defending my title in the pursuit in Frisco in September. I even bought a new track bike this year.The other option is to bow out gracefully for the season. No one would begrudge me that. I could spend the summer doing other things that regular people do like hike, go on vacation, and do beer and barbecue on the weekends. Shit, I haven't taken a summer off racing since 1996-97 when I broke my back, and that was no "vacation". I don't know if my inner bike racer will let me do that, but it does sound like fun, more fun than riding the trainer for the next 6 weeks.

I have cried just twice since I broke my elbow. I didn't cry when I hit the ground, I didn't cry on the 2 hour car drive to the hospital or in the 2.5 hours waiting in the ER to get to see the doctor and get my first dose of morphine. I didn't cry in recovery after surgery or in the hospital alone overnight. I cried once a couple days after surgery when I woke up because it hurt so f'ing much after sleeping through taking my pain medicine. Then I cried tonight because the reality of it all hit me. A week after surgery I'm off the Percocet euphoria of the last week and I've determined this just sucks. I've been playing it off as no big deal, and in the big picture it isn't. I've been hurt worse than this and come back from bigger things, and certainly lots of people have worse problems to deal with, but I still think I'll rate this an 8 out of 10 on the suck meter.

So here we go. Tonight was a lot of words and philosophy, sorry for that. I promise in my future posts there will be a lot more pictures and amusing quips just like my old blog posts. Maybe even a few cat pictures. Next post, I'll tell you all about the crash since a lot of people have asked how it happened.