Consistency and Crash


This summer I endeavored to get on the mountain bike and ride twice a week. It is a great work-out, fun, and has the element of danger that all truly worthwhile experiences offer. The adage "no risk, no reward" is so very true. If nothing is risked, typically nothing is gained. Video games give the illusion of danger but it is virtual reality, not reality.  Not even certain that reality should be in the term. Virtual Unreality might be a more apt term. 

About a month ago, I was on my favorite trail. Not hard but a good 30 minute work-out. Being the summer, the woods is full of flies, skeeters, and gnats. The slower I rode, the more the insect cloud grew, triggering all of my fears and phobias of swarms of bugs. A big ass bug landed on my right arm while I was in the insectacloud and I took my left hand off the handlebars to sweep it off. I didn't want to stop as the swirling creature cloud was turning into a flashmob. The handlebar turned right and my wheel hit a rock and down I went.

My right leg got a big gash (see pic above), my head snapped when I fell off the bike and hit the ground, and my right upper ribs were the flesh and bone that took the uppercut from the ground. My water bottle got thrown from the bike into the woods and my reflector on the mountain bike shattered.  I finished the ride thinking that my ribs were bruised. After a month of still not healed, I figure they were cracked but not fractured through. 

The last month I have put the mountain bike away, attempting to still lift and run and ride but don't risk hurting my ribs more. It has been a delicate balancing act of push and pull. I don't want to lose my gains but I am in no way searching for more pains. Friday night, driven to my car by my brother's snore-storm at my dad's cabin, I couldn't get in a position that didn't cause my ribs to ache, while trying to get a night's sleep.

Maintaining consistency is hard when we crash. It is OK to take the foot of a pedal a bit or a lot depending on the seriousness of the injury. Takes a lot of wisdom to know this calibration between crash and consistency. 

During my Ph.D. program, I swore off what I had termed "potentially discontinuous events." Accidents that would make all of my doctoral work come to naught. Like smashing my head off the pavement where the knowledge and expertise I was gaining would trickle out the brain. So, no mountain biking and related activities that could exact a harsh consequence.  So, in a sense, I am attempting to make up for lost time.

I know that at 55 years of age, it is not exactly normal to be careering off rocks on my mountain bike. Yet, I have counted the costs and know that if I don't push myself, life itself has a way of narrowing opportunities and one of the ways to counter that is to expand or at least maintain boundaries for as long as I can without being an idiot.

I would rather risk broken bones than a broken spirit.  And by broken spirit I don't mean humility that God wants from us. This is the broken spirit that lives life passively and without an element of adventure and risk. Same old same old. Alzheimer's Express.  Life, like a boa constrictor, wraps around the victim in his easy chair wasting his time watching TV, suffocating him silently. Mouth full of potato chips and a can of Natty Ice by his side. The scene of the crime. Death by degrees.     

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