We’re up at 7:00, and downstairs grabbing coffee and eating the tasty breakfast that host David provided to us as part of our stay. He cooked up some pancakes & a quiche, plus a few pots of coffee. I have to say this is about as good as an Airbnb can get. We hang out at the table talking, then get ready for the day, pack up our stuff, and head to the hill.
The hill is a mere 10 minutes away and we’re there by 9:00.
There are fewer people today, which I assume is because of Super Bowl Sunday. Plus we get there earlier today. But as the day goes on, the place never gets crowded which just speaks volumes again for why this weekend is great to get away to ski.
We know the hill & trails better today due to yesterday, so we do a reasonable job leading the charge, though I admit this is mostly Dominique remembering the trails and me sort of nodding my head vaguely remembering where we were the day before. In all the combination of trails worked really well.
Lunch is soup again, but this time D makes the smart move and gets chowder along with me. Again I get the cornbread and again I’m not sure if I like it or not. But I ate the whole damn thing and if you gave me one now, I would eat it again. We dragged a bit getting out of the lodge for whatever reason. Alex gets a bar of something sweet and it’s delicious and fills me up more than I should be. But it’s so tasty!
Before we leave I grab a sticker and a magnet. No idea where the sticker will end up but the magnet is on the fridge already.
We had a great second half but I crashed with literally 100 yards to go on the day. The whole weekend was 65 miles in total. You know how you turn & turn & turn and at the very end of any run you stop turning and run straight out the bottom of the hill? Yeah, I was at that point. I was escaping the hill, running it out flat & straight to the end when I caught an edge and ate shit. I wish I knew what exactly happened but I don’t. I crashed. It hurt. I hobbled my way to the lodge where D & Alex & Mark were waiting, wondering what happened.
The Strava link can be found here. In all my biggest day ever with 35+ miles, 4+ hours, and 18.5k+ total vertical feet.
The drive back was a bit of a spaced out experience. My left calf was destroyed, in as much as it wasn’t really destroyed but it hurt to move and D drove home. I wasn’t able to walk to the car so D & Mark went to get them while Alex & I waited at the pickup spot. I took my boots off because it hurt like hell at the moment. A million things went through my head during this drive but it was mostly a sea of disappointment, disbelief, anger, and disillusionment.
We got home and I laid on the couch while D made dinner. It was bread and cheese & so on.
We talked about it at night then this morning I went to the doctor and here is my life for the foreseeable future:
Reflections on Getting Injured
I will be perfectly honest in saying that I’m sitting here still going through my own personal Kübler-Ross cycle. It’s barely 24 hours later and I’m somewhere in the midst of these 5 stages:
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
Actually, in this case there are only 3, as there really is no Denial nor Bargaining. I don’t think this is a cycle either. It’s pretty much anger, sadness/despondency, and acceptance. I seem to have been cycling through these over the last day and a half with equal parts of each, mixed together with a lot of “trying not to fucking think about this” which I guess is perhaps denial but I guess more anger when stated like this.
As I sit here I don’t know if I will be laid up for a week or 16 weeks. Either way it’s hard for me not to kiss my ski season goodbye. I suppose there’s a chance this is a quick recovery but the doctor wants me to keep this thing on for a week and see where we are then. I tend to doubt I will wake up next Monday at 100%. So being realistic, mountain biking in Sedona isn’t exactly a high probability event right now. That trip starts next Friday.
I keep going back to the moment of the crash as much as I can, and think how this happened, and in reality it’s just shitty luck. This is what happens when you do stuff in life. Like it or not, sometimes you just fall down. I would say that I have nobody to blame but myself, but shit, it’s not like I really did anything wrong. I just caught an edge at the wrong time. I mean really, I won the (anti) lottery at that moment of the day. Check the Internet for this injury. It happens to tons of people both beginner and expert. Shit happens.
It’s just that I’m not young, and I fear that one of these days something like this is going to knock me out of this stuff for good. Do I think this is going to actually play any role in how I go forward the second this thing heals? No, I don’t. But as I’m sitting around all day with this boot on, it’s all I think about right now. I just want to not be hurt, like most people who get hurt.
In the end there is nothing to be learned from this and it’s just another event on the pile of life things that happen and you move on. Maybe one can argue that acceptance is a thing to learn. But I would say that I am not ok accepting that this will ever happen again. This was exactly my 20th day ever on skis, and really it was pretty much my best. I am no longer the guy everyone waits for. I can keep up pretty well, even if I do crash from time to time. This weekend I ate it 3 times total, with the last being the worst yet.
So for now, I’ll look to next Monday and hope that I am in much better shape that I am today. We’ll see soon enough, I suppose. For now I am clunking around with this club foot trying to make it from point A to B as painlessly as possible. So it goes.
Traveling Normandy 
[…] of sleep. This isn’t something I’ve been able to say a lot lately. With the injury (see here), sleep has been hard to come by, so it’s nice to get a solid night. We eventually get up, […]
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