Every Breath I take, Every Move I Make……..my tweaked lyrics to the Police song that have been playing through my head all week. Why am I bastardizing the lyrics to this song?  Well because last Sunday at the Coast Hills Classic I crashed spectacularly towards the end of lap one.  To put it more concisely and use the vernacular that will convey precisely how it was to my friends and peers……. I ate Shit!  HARD!  I’m still not 100% sure how the crash happened all I know is I was moving along at a decent clip and ended up losing control of the front end and slamming into the ground, bouncing once and then sliding about 10-15 feet.

I hit my left side pretty hard, which leads me to my recurring song lyrics.  Every breath I take, every move I make….just freaking hurts.  I am confident that I bruised my ribs high up on my left side near my pectoral muscle.   It is Saturday ( a full week later) now and things are better to a degree.  I sleep on my left side though and find myself waking up multiple times during the night just to role over because laying on that side makes my ribs sore.  Fun times!

I jumped up fairly quickly from the crash and started off again.  My shifting was crap because I tweaked the derailleur hanger too, but fixed that with a little tough love and pulling on the lower derailleur cage while running up a super slick hill.  For the rest of the race shifting was blah, but at least I had use of all my gears, and was no longer shifting into the spokes like the first few feet after the crash.  I will not lie, running up a small hill just afterwards I for a fleeting moment did utter to myself “I’m getting too old for this shit” which I promptly pushed to the back of my head and just kept on going.

Adrenaline is a good thing too, for about 20-30 minutes I was okay, but then I started to realize that I was going to be hurting later…especially Monday morning.  I ended up catching my friend Matt towards the latter part of the 2nd lap and we rode the remainder of the race together.  It was nice to have someone to chat with a bit.

The race course was completely different than past years.  Prior to this year this was probably my 2nd favorite course in Oregon.  This year’s course would have been great if it was dry (Please move the race back to May!!!) but the best description I have read of this race so far described it as “…22 miles of riding through chocolate milk and mushy Oreos….”.

I somehow managed to get my gear I raced in back to a respectable state of clean.  I soaked my stuff in the above bucket and then took it to work with me so I could abuse a washing machine at a local laundromat.  Then I finally washed it again at home with the rest of my weekly workout wear.

That’s about it for now.  Mia and I rode today and deep breathing is okay, I know something still hurts on my left side but I can take a good deep breath and not hurt.  One week until the next race….here is hoping to continued recovery.

Thanks for reading,

-Pete