Falling Down

The last week has presented a lot of challenges not least being knocked off my motorbike, financial issues and a heavy crash on my BMX. After all of that I spent the whole of Sunday lying around, hardly able to move without whimpering like a sick old dog! My injury list is now: right knee ligaments, right wrist strain, strained kneck, left wrist strain, bruised ribs, bruised knees and sprained left foot.

This all started at the beginning of the week when I found myself lying face down in traffic. A pedestrian had run out into the road and appeared from behind a bus - the lights were on green for me but hey...

After the motorbike crash I noticed a few things in the days after where I was being more cautious. On the BMX too, I found myself being more hesitant. The answer is simple: I need a way to regain my confidence. I spent a couple of hours at my local track, basically cruising around and trying to regain the strength in my right knee. I tore the ligaments behind my knee over a month ago. Unfortunately they don't seem to have recovered :-( After only an hour of light riding they were hurting again so I called it a day.

Later on riding home, buoyed on by my session I was feeling good. A windsurfing coach years ago had two pieces of advice for dealing with the fear of crashing:

• You gain confidence when you feel like you are in control and comfortable.


• If you aren't falling off, you aren't trying hard enough.

You may be able to spot the inherent contradiction in these two different pieces of advice! As is often the case, after riding for a while I was probably more tired than I realised and stacked a landing on a little jump on the ride home :-(

The psychological effect of falling off is quite strange because you are more likely to hesitate and crash.

At a recent event by Stewart Bewley, part of the discussion was how you call upon all of your power and confidence even if you are having the worst week of your life. In that context, using a routine to put yourself into a ready mental and emotional state made a lot of sense. I think this is what you can see gladiator like MotoGP riders doing before the race. These guys fall off at high speeds every week. Some of them even get back on with broken bones, such is their will to win. They all have different routines, be it crouching beside the bike like Rossi or listening to Phil Collins (seriously JL?).

The main problem is most likely just that I am getting older so it takes much longer to recover from injuries. The trick looks like it will be to train and get a lot stronger physically so that I can roll out of the crashes more comfortably. Time to hit youtube to find some good training tips. Unfortunately my doc said I have to stay off interval training for at least another week for the neck strain I picked up at the beginning.

What do you do to train after a crash? Tweet Me.