Three Breaking Points

I don’t know what happened, or I do, in literal terms, but how or why it happened remains a mystery to me. What happened is that I turned into the trail from the dirt road that leads up to it, not 200 yards from the parking lot. Upon turning, my pedal caught on a rock that I have never in my life seen before, despite riding this exact trail probably 30 times this year alone. As my pedal struck the rock, my body slid forward off the saddle and impaled itself on my handlebars. I wasn’t going fast, so this wasn’t a catastrophic event. In fact, I didn’t even fall down. I did, however, do something disagreeable to my ribs.

This is the first breaking point, the point where my rib cage came in contact with my bars.

I don’t know that it’s a serious injury. The ribs are pretty inscrutable from an injury perspective. You can bruise, crack, dislocate or fracture them. The solution is mostly to tolerate whatever pain that produces until it stops. Right now, I’m in the “hurts just faintly to breathe” portion of the program.

That’s all just information, as they say.

The larger issue is that this is the latest setback in a long line of setbacks. The brief catalog for the year includes: left shoulder tear of some sort, back ribs crack/bruise, smashed hand (tendon damage), left calf tear, severe right ankle sprain, and now this additional rib bother. I have not been able to move freely since the spring, and none of these problems is fully resolved.

Today, as I rode along cradling my rib cage, trying to convince myself it was nothing, I reached the second breaking point, which was mental. I can’t go on like this, nursing bits of damage and trying to control my approach to avoid further damage. It’s not working. I feel snake bit. I feel fragile. I feel really, really frustrated. If I had the ability (let’s not dig into this) to cry, I’d have broken down there by the side of the trail.

This brings me to the third breaking point.

I was riding badly. Sure, I was in pain, but I was also stuck in my head. Churning. Swirling. And that’s when it struck me that a change of strategy was what I needed. Because I have been engaged in endurance athletics of one stripe or another (some of these injuries are from running), I have had a lot of practice at enduring. Enduring in this context necessarily involved processing and tolerating pain (physical, mental, emotional), and I have become very good at it, possibly too good. My default position is to continue moving forward in whatever way I can and never to stop, which means I show up for our twice weekly outdoor workouts with a calf injury, but just skip the running and do the upper body exercises instead. It means I forgo my Monday run, but ride on Wednesday, Friday and sometimes Saturday.

This approach has failed me this year, for whatever reason, age, miles on the clock, diminishing proprioceptive abilities, simple luck. Spin the wheel. Choose one. Choose them all.

I need a break.

I’m going to take a month off and focus, every day, on therapeutic work. Rest. Dynamic stretching (yoga possibly). Guided physical therapy. Heat wraps. Massage. Electro-stimulation. Anti-inflammatories. Maybe even, don’t tell anyone, some meditation, because if you’ve read this far, you understand that much of this situation exists between my ears.

It’s possible I try to do too much, although too much might just be in my nature. Whatever the case, clearly, I’ve been doing it wrong, but I’m hopeful (despite the fact my knee is still bleeding (not sure why)) that a rest will do me good. And if a month isn’t enough, well…let’s just see what happens next.