think less

one of you wrote "greetings from this leg of the pants of time" which at first confused me mightily and then made me laugh rally hard.

so welcome back to my time warp. i have decided to maybe not write a new post every day until my postdated posts clear, but at this rate it will be june before we all catch up.

there's a picture that's been making the rounds of the interwebs, and i think it applies here. go ahead, look. it's funny.

today i went to ride wednesday's course. well, it's tuesday's course, too, but on tuesdays we do it on foot and wednesdays we ride. it what we do. this week is the season opener.

i'm way out of my prime shape and both of you already know that, but just for good measure i will reassert that illness can take a wide stripe out of you for a very long time. often it feels like one step forward, one step back, but i know it's really closer to five steps forward, four steps back.

recovery is slow.

so i went with the crashcos last week to ride it and sucked toast and i went yesterday to ride it, and today i thought i would unload some of my mental baggage by riding it backward. last week i opined that it would ride swoopier in reverse anyway, and officially the trails are all two-way anyhow, if a little harder to follow against the arrows.

if you want to know your local racecourse well, ride it a lot. if you want to know it intimately, ride it backward. ride it forward and backward and reride the hard spots and ride all the connecting trails and also do it on foot, because no matter how much you pay attention to the trail, you see a lot more of it on foot than you do riding.

tomorrow is a planned rest day. i am still sore from last week's hiking and tuesday night's run is going to hurt no matter how i slice it, so tomorrow i have planned a fun day of bicycle maintenance and some laundry and some reclining. and the regular ingestion of ibuprofen, at least until the inflammation in my feet and knees tones down a bit.


the thing about the trails, though, is that even though every year there's some new singletrack and eric cuisinarts everything up to run different, there are always places you remember. and if you ride enough, you fall some. sometimes you fall very painfully and remember a particular shelf or wall crossing with some apprehension.

mrs. crashco still does not like riding the rock garden ever since that one night we had to take her to the ER.

so for me there's the little place where i tore my ear, the place where i fell on my head and punctured a helmet, the place where i separated a shoulder, and that place where i flew like superman over my handlebars.

these days the worry of those places holds me a little tighter than it does when i'm in good shape and able to shrug it off.

but i have decided to approach it as if i were just starting out, learning the skills as if for the first time and not being disappointed with my results. and i'm riding along the course backwards in the field, coming to the topknot of goose hill thinking that this is a very good idea to shake loose some of the nerves and restore confidence.

and i get to that little ledge up top and i'm thinking: last time i rode this, i went down. hard. good thing the course goes other way this year. well, i'll just put my tire up and over-

-and i went down.

hard.

right on the rock, with my left elbow.

small ragged wound, but happily unusually clean and when i went to clean it out, there was no gravel and not much dirt and the bruise will be festive, but the worst part of it is that it's warm out and i have to wear long sleeves because i fell (walking) a couple of days ago and ran my right forearm right along a sawed-off sapling and have a long not totally clean rip from wrist to elbow, and i can't have either of those things dragging on  the furniture.

which means i'm a little warmer than i'd like to be.

maybe i will just go without pants.

anyway, i will posit the following: if you are not a health care worker and your day 's activities include debriding anything, you are not having your best possible day.