Injured Reserve on the Levee

The Bonnet Carré Spillway  

I hate riding when I'm injured, but I guess I hate not riding when I'm injured more. For the past week my riding has been a study in compromise. It's like being on injured reserve. I've been sitting on the back of the group rides, trying mostly unsuccessfully to limit the impact, both literal and figurative, on my achy wrist and thumb joint. The reality, though, is that it's practically impossible to ride the bike without putting a fair amount of pressure on that hand. The times when it would be nicest to have the hand off the bars are also precisely the times when a firm two-handed grip is most needed.

I rode the Saturday Giro, which fortunately turned out to be a bit on the tame side, as easily as I could, continually surfing around at the back for the best draft while constantly changing hand positions in search of something more comfortable. I'd taken some naproxin in the morning, and that definitely helped, but there were still plenty of bumps in the road to remind me that things were definitely not back to normal yet. The wrist was achy enough that when I got home I iced it for a while.  Don't really know if that helped or not.

So when Mignon sent a text suggesting a Sunday ride out to the Spillway on the relatively smooth bike path, I jumped at the chance. The weather around here continues to be unusually good for riding, although I'd have to say we are approaching drought conditions.  I don't think I've seen any significant rain in two or three weeks now. Anyway, we ended up with around fifteen people on Sunday. One of them was Brady, who was keeping the pace a bit higher than I'd been expecting.  It's funny how bad you feel when a group ride is faster than you were expecting.  I'm sure that if I'd done the Giro I would have felt fine, but for this ride I'd been expecting something in the 18-20 mph range and instead got something in the 21-24 mph range.  You wouldn't think it would matter much, but I guess I was just hoping for an easier ride and a chance to give the hand some rest. The good news is that the Mississippi River levee bike path work is almost complete.  The yellow lane divider has been put down on all of the repaired sections, practically all of the path has been cleared of dirt and rocks, and the contractor's two big mobile homes have been removed from the old PHI Helicopter site where they'd been for at least two or three years. The only remaining problems are the bypass around the new green pipes at Florida Street and the five or six places where the new asphalt has collapsed on the edges where I guess the underlying dirt hadn't been sufficiently compacted before a truck rolled over it. This morning I rode easy out to Williams Blvd. and back.  On the return trip I dropped down to River Road as usual to go around the green pipes and then was surprised to find the access road back up to the top on the other side blocked.  It looked like they were working  on repairing the collapsed asphalt up there, so that's a good thing.  I had to stay on River Road holding up traffic for a little while before I could take the next, unpaved, access road back up to the bike path.  A little while later I came across a guy walking his hybrid bike with a flat.  I asked him how far he had to go and when he said Carrollton Avenue, which was still a few miles away, I stopped and fixed the flat for him. That was my good deed for the day, I guess.

Meanwhile, I've been checking up on Steve Tilford's blog that is being updated by friends since he suffered a serious head injury on Friday during a group ride in Topeka.  We're talking fractured skull and brain bleed here, so he was in ICU for a few days and it was probably a bit of touch and go for a while there.  He'd been riding without a helmet when a dog ran into the bunch during a sprint. I suspect the no-helmet thing was an freak thing since just the day before he'd blogged about taking a bunch of old helmets to a community organization to give to riders who needed them. For those who don't know, Steve is the definition of old-school U.S. bike racer. There's an interview with him from 2010 here.  He's been racing about as long as I have, although always quite a few levels above.  He's been on the national team, raced in Europe and South America on numerous occasions, raced road and mountain bike at the highest levels, won a bunch of national championships and classic U.S. races, etc., and has just never stopped. They were writing articles about how old he is for over a decade now. It's been interesting reading his blog because I see him dealing with the same age-related issues as I, except for him it's like, "how come I'm having so much trouble winning this Pro/1 race," while for me it's like, "how come I'm getting dropped in a LAMBRA master's race." Anyway, I read this afternoon that he's been transferred out of the ICU and in classic tough old bike-racer fashion  "at 4:30am Steve decided it was time for a shower. He disabled his bed alarm,  rolled his IV stand into the bathroom and took one, he almost got away with it but for the noise from the water. He will not be going home until he can eat and drink without puking everything up."  I took it as a good sign, though, despite the fact he's clearly not quite out of the woods yet.  There's a pretty good chance of long-term neurological problems from that kind of injury, one of which is death, so the fact that he's communicating and responsive and all is probably a very encouraging thing. I wish Steve a quick and full recovery, and fully expect to see him back on the bike next Spring.