24 | January | 2011

Note: after this blog post I promise that I will stop making references to my recent road accident. I expect everyone’s getting a bit bored of me droning on about it by now (I’m certainly bored of it). Anyway…

One of the positive side-effects of getting injured is that you can’t do anything but rest. Well, you can, but if you did you’d not get better very quickly, it hurts and you’d get told off by your wife/doctor/mum. The couple of weeks of rest, comprising a week of doing absolutely no physical activity at all and generally feeling sorry for myself followed by a week of more of that but with a couple of short, easy offroad rides has ended with me attempting a longer ride on the road bike.

I expected to have to cut this ride short to be honest. I thought that I would start to get horrifying flashbacks to the accident or the increased demand on my body would just be far too uncomfortable, but apart from a few nervous approaches to road junctions where cars were waiting to make their move, I felt utterly fantastic.

I even rode the same route that I was riding two weeks ago when I got bounced. I even stopped to take a photo at the scene.

Part of this feeling was because of the joy of being out on the bike again (once I was out of the urban chaos and in the hills that is). I literally felt lucky to be alive. The main source of my ‘fantastic’ feeling though was the obvious effect 2 weeks of putting my feet up has had on me physically. I felt easily as good as I did in the summer and I’ve realised just how short of a good rest I was. The worries about suddenly and inexplicably being slower than I was, the concern that I was in some way ‘losing it’ evaporated in a single 4 hours of riding a bike – the realisation that I’ve never really rested properly after any kind of trauma – be that a big race or a hard training week. Sure, I’ve got some work to do to regain some fitness but I’ve suddenly looked at how I’ve been training in the past and more importantly, how I’ve been NOT training.