Day 62 - A Matter of Time

My wife called me in the morning to tell me that one of my riding buddies, Brian (the guy kissing the burro while on a mountain biking trip in Saltillo, Mexico, last year), took a nasty fall while riding some hilly singletrack at Sullivan City. Concerned, a couple of my friends/riding buddies and I met up with him after work to see how he was doing. His arm was all scratched up and his shoulder was in a sling. The doctor had reset his separated shoulder in the morning. As we talked about his wreck, I realized that we had something in common -- each of us had either broken or seriously injured ourselves from mountain biking. Nico broke a finger in his hand after an encounter with his handlebar and a tree. Harold fractured his wrist after riding his bike into a canal ditch. I broke my hip after clipping a signpost with my handlebars. And Brian had separated his shoulder after losing it down a hill. I came to the conclusion that if you mountain bike the way we do -- hard and fast -- you will fall, and eventually you will get hurt. Wrecking goes with the territory. It's just a matter of time before you will hit the dirt, road, or in my case the concrete. Despite our injuries we will continue to mountain bike because we love riding. We just might have to slow down a little bit!