Week 14: Here comes next year!

Week 14 didn't turn out as I hoped.  The training during the week witnessed new power and speeds for me, again!  I was getting stronger and stronger, blowing past my old best efforts.  My biggest weakness was short burst power, but I hit well over 1,200 watts on a warm up sprint Thursday!

But it all changed on Saturday.  Saturday I did the shootout, and planned on meeting up with some teammates to go up Madera Canyon.  The last time I did the shootout healthy, I got spit out the back.  But, that was a while ago and I thought today would be much different.

Well, different, it was.

I had no trouble staying with the group to the bridge or the next few miles after the bridge, both sections are difficult for me in the Main Shootout because I'm fat.  I was getting ready for Sprint Hill when some dude two wheels to my right just came in to his left for no reason at all.  Originally I thought he was swerving to miss a pot-hole or something, but I have GoPro footage of it...there was NOTHING there.  He bumped the rider next to me, who would've gone down if I wasn't there to take his fall.  I leaned into him, he straighted up and then left me to counterbalance and overcorrect and slam into the pavement on my head at 26 mph.  (Keep in mind all of that happened in a split second and I'll post the video here in this entry.)

The vinyl coloring is all that holds the helmet in one piece!

Long story short, two ambulance rides and two ER visits, a chest tube to inflate and drain the lung, a sponge bath, 2 CT scans, 14 x-rays and four days later I'm finally home.  From the crash I suffered broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a concussion, a bone bruise on my left knee, extensive roadrash and bruising of course, and the general aches and pains that go with 26 to zero mph on the pavement in zero seconds.  My right side, where I went down, is pulverized.  Everything is tender. But ... I'll recover.

Monday, though, Monday was dark.  It was one of the worst days I've ever had.  I won't go into details because I would really rather not relive it.  Eventually I was able to sleep deep and that provided a bit of a reset for my body.  When I woke in the afternoon I saw that my sister had set up an account where people could donate money to help me with some of the medical expenses.  At this point, people have donated about $1,500!  It's not the money, but the support that turned my ultimate bad day into one of the best days of my life.  I am deeply touched by the outpouring of support, be it in social media, phone calls, text messages, visits in the hospital or financial donations!  I had so many people, many of whom I barely know, go out of their way to provide encouragement and company and money ... it's truly humbling.

So what's next?  A lot.  I've got six weeks off of the bike.  I can ride on the indoor trainer as much as I like, and I made huge gains last winter doing just that.  So my plan is to focus on healing first, get to a point where I can start training at an intensity where I can focus on weight loss and work hard to get down to 180-ish.

Now I feel horrible for putting my family and friends through the heartache of watching me in the hospital and suffering like that.  I'm not insensitive to those things.  I don't ever want to put them through anything of that sort again, which is tricky because riding a bike is dangerous, especially racing.  In the coming weeks I'll talk with my wife about racing in the future, but she was ready to go out and buy me a new bike on the spot if mine was destroyed in the crash (which it wasn't).  So I think she knows how good racing is for me mentally and emotionally.

I will try and learn from this crash, though I really don't see what I could've done differently.  I was just riding along and got slammed into from the right, and hard, going over 25 mph.  I know I got hit hard because I get bumped a lot in these rides and I almost never get moved.  That's one up-shot of outweighing other cyclists by 50 pounds!

I currently am suffering from a lot of confusion and what-not from the concussion, but wanted to write about what happened and give a brief teaser of what's to come for me.  In the near future I'll flesh out what I'm doing next and will keep this blog updated with those plans and they progress they provide.

If you don't want to see pictures of blood, or images that might be disturbing, like my head sliding against the pavement, go ahead and leave now.

Here's the video.  I cropped it pretty short, can't see much, but you CAN see Bryan Little, who was behind me, save his own neck with an incredible bunny hop over me and my bike!  Unfortunately he still went down, but wasn't seriously injured! He must be a ninja!

Collapsed lung and abnormal diaphragm 

That's my head and hand on the pavement.