Hanging in There...Just.
David Smith | Monday 28th April, 2008
David Smith |   |
In my last entry I said I was going to ‘go with the flow,’ well if I take similar analogy ‘rolling with the punches,’ then I quickly took a metaphorical uppercut to the chin at the Tour du Charollais. After a mere 20km I found myself lying like some kind of beached whale on my back in the ditch fairly convinced I’d fractured my hip. I’m still not entirely sure how it happened although suffice to say there were a good deal of riders that day who at the slightest sign of trouble would just lock up the back wheel and hope for the best.
In that short half hour before I hit the deck I saw no less the four incidents where guys were skidding all over the place for no apparent reason and the fifth was fatal for me. We were 1km from the first GPM (yes, that’s right we were actually going up a climb at the time) when the bunch suddenly slowed up and I heard a serious crunch to my left, before I knew what was happening it was already too late. I didn’t even have time to get my hand off the handle bar to break my fall, I took the full force of the impact on my elbow and even more so on my hip.
I was quickly evacuated to the nearest hospital where I spent an exceedingly boring afternoon waiting to be x-rayed. The hospital staff had foresight to put me in a room with a neck brace on so I couldn’t move my head with a loud ticking clock in front of me. I was left to stew for an hour and half or so by myself and I came pretty close to losing my mind. Just when I thought insanity was imminent I was whisked away for the x-rays and then put back in the same room for another hour and a half while I waited for a doctor to come and have a look at them. Fortunately it turned out nothing was actually broken and the pain in my hip was just coming from severe bruising. I was eventually picked up by the team at around 7pm and shown what remained of the front wheel of my bike which had more or less split clean in two. Despite the relatively slow speed of about 30km/h it had been a pretty hard impact and I was lucky not to come off worse than I did.
The timing of the crash was really lousy because Rhone-Alpes Isère Tour was due to start on the Thursday and Regis and Michel decided it would be better for me not to start. I could understand the reasoning behind the decision and knew it was the right one but I was nevertheless bitterly disappointed to miss out on the biggest race of the year in the area where I live. But as the French say ‘c’est la vie..’
Within a few days of the crash I was able to return to normal training, the injury was more painful when walking than when riding the bike so I managed to get in a decent week. I raced the following Sunday at a 1/2/3 cat race which finished in a sprint. I was ok in the bunch but when I tried to attack I felt I was lacking a good deal of power and never got very far. Given the circumstances though it wasn’t so bad…
This last week under coach Mark Young’s guidance I’ve put in another good week’s training and was putting out some reasonable figures on the power meter. On Saturday the team travelled up to
My upcoming schedule is heavy, on Saturday we travel to the Dordogne for the Tour du Périgord and then travel on to
À bientôt.
