Crash. Don’t learn.

Phone case v Tree
£2 case saved£500 phone

So crashing then: Part of the sport. Side effect of accelerating out of your comfort zone. Price of entry worth the risk of injury. Reactions slowed by age. Outcomes predefined by cognitive dissonance. Bad luck. Bad day. Bad injury.

It doesn’t matter how you got here. But now you’re in the hall of the injured – then welcome. Valhalla for the not yet dead but impressively bruised. Walk away from most with the greatest injury to your pride, your thin skin pricked by the laughter of your mates. Those are the good ones.

The bad ones are bad. We don’t talk about those much. Occasionally though some empathy-free-zone will wait until you’re facing down some tech-death rock horror before announcing ‘Yeah my mate bob fucked himself up here bigtime.’ Pause while he receives multiple death stares. No matter he continues: ‘We call him Wheelchair Bob now‘.

Thanks for breaking the unwritten rule that major injuries are only discussed once everyone is safely ensconced in the pub with exactly the same number of unbloodied limbs they started the day with. And afterwords ‘Right, who invited dickhead? Never again. Clear?

We’re a superstitious bunch considering our only gods are forest nymphs and the ones inside our heads. I’m a left sock on first guy, tap all the bikes hanging on the walls of shedofdreams(tm) before lights out, select my ‘lucky gloves‘ to mitigate falling on difficult trails and toast every injury-free ride with a beer or two*

With such an pretorian guard of mental and physical amulets, it seems rather unfair to find myself flying through the air – long separated from my trusty steed – and accelerating towards a stout looking tree at about escape velocity.

One of the many joys of sliding into semi-retirement is my world is not fixed around some outdated concept of turning up to an office every day. As a consequence I get to ride with Adam who is younger, much faster and considerably more bouncy than me.

Especially on his local trails where he transits through some kind of worm hole in the second corner, only re-appearing at trails end looking entirely un-exercised while I arrive blowing it out of my arse some thirty seconds later.

We’d ridden these woods two weeks before when my Captain Slow excuses were forged deep in the mud and slop where traction may once have lived. Seasonal strangeness saw it actually dry up to close to dust this day and I was riding my favourite chubby bike.

So in my defence, perfect conditions. Except Autumn preserves sufficient vegetation to hide a stump perfectly configured to avoid your peripheral vision, while attracting my lower limb in some kind of organic tractor beam. I was already distracted having crashed a little further down the trail on my previous visit. Going to nail that this time I thought confidently as I nailed my foot to the aforementioned stump.

I bloody hate physics. It never gives you a day off. It’s like one of those stupid tests we had at school. If a mountain bike is travelling at 15 miles per hour and it’s motion is arrested by a solid object, what forces are in effect and what are the possible outcomes?

Out is where we came in. I exited out the front but not before the pedal raked my calf with rock sharpened pins. My still pretty-shagged hand, from binning it in Spain, insisted on protection in my organic body armour leaving my back to present a foetal like proposition to a blameless tree.

I have a pack with a back protector. Today it was protecting a hook in my shed, so the following couple of seconds were spent wondering exactly how many of my limbs responded to frantic neural commands. All of them. Thank Christ for that. Right I’ll have a proper sit down down now.

Fuck that hurt. The phone case in the picture saved my phone but tattooed my back. My slammed toe was screaming, but I couldn’t shout back as I’d lost the power of speech. Smacking a tree will do that to a man. I kind of hissed at Adam somewhere down the trail but he was already on his way back having reconciled the sounds of human tree felling with his mate possibly in some duress.

Humour they say kick-starts the healing process. I’m going to make the charitable assumption that was the trigger for Adam pissing himself as I lay supine on the ground performing my best ‘fish out of water’ impression.

Quitting absolutely was an option. But this late in the year, how many more warm, dry almost dusty days are we going to get? So I rode some more, whinged a bit, took a wide line around sniper stumps and still had a far better time than if I’d stayed inside and uninjured.

Still hurts tho. I’ve worn my back protector since. Took my a couple of descents to work myself back up to standard ‘mediocre speed’ but all good since then. Didn’t crash due to lack of commitment, didn’t over analyse the results, did pretend to be stoic but blew that after about 30 seconds. This convinced my mates I wasn’t concussed.

I seem to be writing more about crashing than riding. One is more interesting than the other. I’ll take boredom for a while tho if that’s okay.

*although rigorous analysis would suggest that’s more about my love of beer than any love of symbolism.

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