The truth about riding bikes is that eventually you’re going to go down. The number of times you go down and how hard you hit is directly proportional to how much you ride and how fast you go. If you race on any level your risk goes up exponentially.
It’s an uncomfortable subject. If you think about it too much, you’ll stop riding altogether and take up golf. And while I’ve never faced the pressure or risk of professional riders, I’ve had my share of mishaps. As an amateur there’s something about the knowledge of having to get up the next day to go to a job, pay a mortgage and do all the other general adulting required by life that tends to make you throttle back a degree or two. But even so, given the right circumstances a competitive person will tend to forget about all that and push things to seemingly illogical levels of risk even if the reward is nothing more than a cheesy trophy and bragging rights.
In terms of my personal injuries over the years, the ones I can remember:
- Broken collar bone
- Three broken ribs
- Collapsed lung
- Broken hip
- Compressed disk (probably due to life in general but not helped by riding mountain bikes for years)
- Sprained ankle
- Ripped off fingernail
- Innumerable cuts and bruises
- Countless strawberries on my backside
- Yards of skin left on pavement and rocks.
Really not that bad compared to some people I know but distressing none the less. And while we all like to compare battle scars after the fact, it doesn’t make falling any easier.
Since moving to Salida I’ve backed off what I’m willing to do on a bike quite a bit. I’m not racing so there’s no incentive to push anything to the limit anymore. I’m older and those encounters with terra firma feel a whole lot firmer than they used to. Plus, the terrain around here is so rocky that the price of an error can be extremely high. Now riding is all about getting outside, enjoying the flow of the terrain and taking in the scenery.
My mantra has become: Victory is being able to do it again tomorrow.
This short film made me think about all this. It’s an interesting look at falling from the perspective of three professional mountain bikers.