243 – Games of Skill and Chance

“If you aren’t crashing every once in awhile, you aren’t pushing hard enough.”

… is terrible advice. But crashing does happen, in any sport where you’re propelling yourself faster than a walk.

I went out today for a joyride with a couple buddies, and that law of averages caught up with me at last. We went out to MoMBA for a nice morning ride, my second in as many days. It was a nice change, just riding for the sake of riding, since there isn’t a race coming up soon to train for. We went out and did a small loop before circling back to the parking lot to check if any more of our friends had showed up, and then dove back into the woods.

I was feeling good physically, and confident mentally. All the recent seat time has put as much polish on my mountain biking skills as they’ve ever had, and I was looking forward to totally wearing myself out on the trails this morning. I took the lead as we rolled back into the woods, angling left at the fork to head down the switchbacks into Creekside.

I was rolling easy, enjoying the relaxed pace of a non-race, non-training ride. I splashed through the first creek crossing… and found myself abruptly on the ground on the other side! My front tire had completely lost traction on the wet rocks on the far side of the creekbed, and as I started to pedal out, the front end folded like a stack of cards and dropped me unceremoniously on the rocks.

Four out of five crashes for me are no big deal, but it took me a minute to recover from this one. I crashed so suddenly that I was still clipped into the bike, and it took a second to twist myself free and get up, yelling pained expletives the whole time. I had come down on my right hip and forearm, and my hip was already telling me how big the resulting bruise was going to be. My thumb hurt too, and I was bleeding a bit from my forearm, but I figured I was good to at least finish the lap before I went home to clean and ice everything.

We gathered ourselves up (one of my buddies had crashed lightly as well, for a different reason), and pedaled on ahead. I was still in the lead of our little formation, but was riding tight and slow, working to get my mojo back after the crash. It always takes a bit to get back into the flow of things after a crash, and sure enough I was riding like a total newbie for the next couple miles.

This was made more difficult by the increasing discomfort from my right thumb. I had wrenched or jammed it somehow on the way down, and it was proving more and more difficult to squeeze the brake lever or push through a downshift. I started to wonder if I had momentarily dislocated it. By the end of Creekside, it was fairly useless, and I had the other guys go ahead of me while I took my glove off and rinsed the blood off my arm.

We started down Upper Stealth from there, and I knew in 100 yards that it wasn’t worth it any more. My thumb was starting to swell up and get more painful already, and I just couldn’t ride well with it like that. If it had been a race I would have just pressed on, but there was no point in it for a “fun” ride, so I called my goodbyes to the guys ahead of me, turned back up toward the trailhead and went home.

After a shower and some ice, things weren’t getting better, so I headed in for an x-ray to make sure there wasn’t any substantial damage. The ER doc diagnosed me with a sprain, gave me a brace and offered some Vitamin I, which I declined.

I hate crashing. There just isn’t anything good about it, and I hate coming away from a crash with injuries even more. Still, as crashes go, this is about the best way to have it. My injuries are relatively minor, and I don’t have a mountain bike race coming up to worry about. For that matter, given all of the riding, training and racing I’ve been doing this year, I’m shocked this is the first crash I’ve had that warranted medial attention. So I’ll take this little setback cheerfully, knowing how much worse, and more poorly timed, it could’ve been. In games of skill and chance such as mountain biking, I’ll take this kind of bad luck every time.