Giverola

12 March 2009

Hola from Giverola.  I have very little Internet time here, so instead of e-mailing everyone I need to, I will just update you all here and hope that everyone sees.  I am currently on house arrest for the afternoon, after a crash I had this morning.  Similar to Meghan's early season crash down in Morrison (www.meghan-kane.blogspot.com for photos) I have a quickly swelling black eye to flaunt.  More on that later...

 

We arrived here by bus on Saturday morning, after a 12-hour drive overnight.  We rode for 5 hours on Saturday, hard.  

 

On Sunday, we started our normal Giverola routine - wake up at 7, run, breakfast, ride for 3-5 hours, lunch, ride for 3-5 hours, massage and prop legs, dinner, film (the coaches have cameras to scrutinize our technical abilities) and finally around 10.00, bed.  It's been a very regimented routine until yesterday, which was our one and only "day off".  I and the National Team, headed into Lloret le Mar, an hour's ride away, to do some coffee-drinking, pizza-eating, and shopping.  Lots of fun.  I have good videos and pictures to show when I get home.  

 

Our riding here consists of a lot of technical work, as expected... but it's even more difficult than I first imagined.  I am supremely out of shape still - and on top of that, the Swiss are all extremely powerful.  Today, for example, we went out for a shorter-than-normal 3-hour ride on the trails.  We did drills and worked on trails, and finally had a little race on the Nazi Trail - christened this by the locals because the National Team rides it so often.  On the second loop of this technical descent/road climb, I crashed hard and hit a tree.  Everything was good except I had some trouble seeing out of my left eye.  For a second, I was surprised by how much pain I was in - it had been a very minor crash given the circumstances.  When I managed to figure out where I was exactly, I realized that I had received a sharp blow to my left eye from the end of a tree-limb, and there were a fair amount of tears (I thought at first it was blood, but soon realized that my eye was just attempting to flush all the dirt and bark out) flowing all across my face.  In shock, I was able to walk down the rest of the trail - characteristically, not a single rider stopped to ask if I was alright - and made it to the bottom, only to realize that I had to climb back up to tell Beat, who was filming at the top of the trail, that I would no longer be around that morning.  The rest is not as exciting, although getting all the way back to the hotel was thrilling with a swollen left eye and very little vision.  Now that I'm healing up - it took the better part of the morning for my eye to flush clean - I feel much better, although am still frustrated with my stupid mistakes that led to the crash.  I've realized here that in a setting where all of the riders appear to have no fear, it's important to know your limits... and always wear glasses, although they didn't help me too much.

 

13 March 2009

I woke up this morning, and immediately realized how lucky I was to have complete sight out of my left eye, after removing a half-an-inch piece of wood from my brow.  That wasn’t altogether a pleasant wake-up. 

If yesterday’s events weren’t reference to how hard it is here in Spain, then maybe today will prove more worthy.  After a longer jog and breakfast this morning, we headed out for 4 hours on the road, where I felt very good, despite the fact that I could see little out of my left peripheral vision.  

I told myself before lunch that today, I would push the limits a little and attempt to break the fear left over from yesterday.  However, once out on the trail, I soon realized that I was riding worse than ever.  The pressure from the riders around me, and my own pressure on myself was building up, and it seemed that I was bobbling and missing corners left and right.  When Marc and Patrick decided that I would be the one to lead a sketchy decent back into Tossa where Beat would be filming, I wasn’t altogether thrilled, but took it as a chance to once again gain some confidence.  The confidence I found on the trail led me right into a trap; about 5 minutes into the steep decent, I took a sharp, rocky, extremely steep switchback at just the right angle to catch my front end on a rock and preceded to launch over the handlebars about 15 feet off the trail – once again right onto my face. Battles between rock and head have never held very good odds for the head, but I got lucky again, and made contact on my jaw instead of my teeth – no replacement needed.  The force from the impact ran through my head, down my back, and into my bike… I effectively lowered the seat 6 inches from its starting point all from the impact on my face.  How pleasant. 

Similar to yesterday, I have very little injury to show for the pain I feel – a severely bruised leg and a nice bit of road rash on the chin.  Most of the pain comes from my head and jaw, which have both been throbbing since the accident, including the hour-long ride back to the hotel.  I’ve never had a concussion before, but this is for sure how it feels.  It feels good to be back at the hotel, but only because I’m not on the bike.  I miss home more than ever, and the people there that make it great. 

I won’t even go into details on how I feel about cycling right now.  From the pain and the fatigue, I don’t want to lead into any false pretenses of quitting for good, but I must say that the first thought that went through my head after my wreck today was “That’s it.  I’m done with this shit.”  Quitting has never crossed my mind before – at least in regards to cycling - so this is an interesting feeling.

I’ll get some sleep, and hopefully reconsider my now overbearing longing to jump on a plane the minute I get back to Switzerland and head home.