Aww, dammit anyway!

I've been riding and racing seriously since early 1984. In that time, with the exception of getting picked off by cars, I'd never had an accident which took me off the bike for more than a day. In the past 3 years, I think I've more than made up for that.

In 2005, I broke 1 collarbone, cracked another bone on the opposite shoulder, tore up all the chest muscles along the ribcage along with some bruised ribs and had a slight lung puncture. That was accident 1 that year. The second one came just as I was coming back into form. I hit a gopher hole on a cross training ride and collapsed the frame due to the sudden stop, went ass over tin cups and separated a shoulder.

The 2006 road season was better, but the lungs still weren't quite up to par yet. I got to just a couple weeks ahead of the cross season and just before one of my favorite crits of the year at Chagrin Falls, OH, I got taken out in another race where I separated the opposite shoulder from the previous one I did the previous year. Now I'm not sure which I would rather do - just break the damn collarbone again, or have the separated shoulder. I've had both twice now and while the broken collarbone hurts, the separated shoulder just absolutely sucks. The pain from that seemed to last much longer and when up on the trainer, began to hurt whether I jarred it or not. A couple weeks later with the shoulder healing, I was at Ryan Leech's cross camp and in an attempt to be taking it easy, I understeered the bike and had the front wheel slip off the edge of a concrete sidewalk. In the embarrassing fall, I whacked my hand good and only later realized after being unable to brake, that I broke my damn finger which had begun to swell up quite a bit. So, I wound up starting the cross season a few weeks later with a wad of padding wrapped around my fingers so they could take the abuse from the bars.

2007, was fairly quiet til one of the WV mountain bike series races that I started doing this year. I found it in myself to prove to the world that one can indeed to an endo on a 29er. People have said it couldn't be done, leave it to me to prove them wrong. Result - another broken finger. Luckily, that was the only thing that happened last year. I did a spectacular job of breaking a carbon wheel to pieces at Granogue though. It was a pretty cool crash in that A) I didn't get hurt - bad and B) it made quite a noise and certainly got me noticed. If you can't do something well, at least be colorful about it.

Now, it's 2008. A new year. A new attitude. A renewed vow to train harder for the upcoming season. I'm starting it by doing the Sunday Morgantown "Fun" mountain bike rides. It's alot of fun. I got lost on the first one. The next 2 were better and I was getting used to single-speeding it again. I was even getting quite confident on the tricky sections, so much so that I zipped thru one just a bit too fast and WHAM! Slipped right out and landed hard on my side. It was about 15 minutes later that I realized something wasn't right so I wisely cut off at a convenient point and got back to the car. From previous experiences, I remembered what cracked ribs felt like. Over the next week, I was reminded of it again and again. The phrase that was going thru my mind every time I winced from an effort was 'Dammit anyway'. I have got to break this cycle of injuries.

Well, hopefully I've got my injury for the year out of the way now. I am coming back slowly from it. Time to have a clean racing season and try to top the win count from last year. The first road race of the season is in 3 weeks. I like to use those early flat mid-Ohio races for some good hard-assed training rides. For some reason, I've always done well when it's cold out. I don't think its so much that I ride better. It's just that everyone else slows down to my speed.

And now that I've been goofing off for a bit here, I should really get back to work and get some billable hours in. Gotta get this years stock of tires in.

New Year, New things going on.

Well, it's a new year and I've actually been riding a bit. Not as much as I'd like. I also haven't been able to sit on the trainer for more than 30 minutes at a time, though I did go to a couple spinning rides at the local gym. It's been a bit tougher getting motivated this year. After a very lackluster cros season where the only high points were getting a new bike(new toys are always fun) and a good move at Natz which was short lived after bouncing myself off the icy course a couple times. The Sunday mountain bike rides have been fun, though I've started the year off with an injury. On my third ride there, I went down hard on my side at it's been a week and a half and the side still hurts. I've either cracked or bruised a rib, so that's going to slow things down a bit. It does give me time to concentrate on work though. I'm normally a computer jockey doing everything from showing people the very basics of how to copy a file from a floppy disk to linking buildings up via a wireless network to doing custom programming. It can be a pretty boring existance though not doing the same thing day in day out isn't too bad. One proposal for work I just sent out could change that some and put me into the area where I'll be getting paid to play. You might even get to read about it in the news. Here's hoping...