Hello again.
I get what you are saying and I meant to add in my earlier post that I am doing all my riding (what there is of it) at the moment on my hardtail. For probably all the wrong reasons I am much more gung ho when riding with 5+ inches of bounce. So the hardtail makes me think more about how I am riding and stops me from over reaching when my body just isn’t ready for it. As you say, I’m already skipping past the ‘this is great just to be riding’ to ‘I really wanna pump that and move the bike around more’ stage, but my arm complains and so I’m just railing it back in.
It isn’t inevitable that you are going to crash. So much of how we ride and whether we ride out the tricky stuff when it all goes Pete Tong is entirely in the mind. I know that at the moment that I’m being more cautious (suddenly those trees gaps look tiny on the bad arm side and I’m flinching) so actually it helps to just be riding a bit more slowly and well within my limits, because it’s that little nervous doubt in your mind that is the key contributor (in terms of what you then do physically – e.g grab a handful of brake) to crashing. When I’m more confident in the strength of my arm I’ll forget about the vulnerability and be looking straight through the gap rather than imagining the consequences of not making it.
It’s totally natural for me to feel like this and I’m really chilled about taking my time, cause like you I don’t want to repeat 3 months off the bike. This is the worst injury I’ve ever had from biking so I consider myself pretty lucky really, but it has been a learning curve and I have constant battles with myself about wanting to be further along (in terms of riding) than I am.
Only you know how physically strong you are feeling, so be guided by that and the enjoyment of riding not some notion that you must be going faster and taking risks cause otherwise it’s not really worth it.
Nice to see Tony pop up earlier with encouraging words … he’s the person I want to see later in the year to keep me rolling 🙂
