Liberation Day

Coming back from any accident, injury or other disaster, if you're lucky you have a day when it just doesn't matter any more. Let's call that day Liberation Day.

Prior to that day, whatever calamity befell you is the first thing in your mind when you get back on the bike. It doesn't matter how trivial it is. Wife of Rouleur is still terrified of clip-ons after a standstill tipover a couple years ago. I still am freaky about this one turn at Rosaryville that I overshot, to my detriment and the detriment of a small but surprisingly painful sapling.

Most of these little traumas fade over time, but the bigger ones prey on the psyche for a while, feasting on doubts and bringing a smorgasbord of negative internal monologue all their own.

No matter how trivial the trials of a given days ride, until you have celebrated Liberation Day, there is always a nagging feeling that the ride's problems are due to the disaster you suffered how-long-ago.

For instance, I was riding in a stiff headwind last week. My internal voice kept asking if my weakness was due to a pinched nerve in my back. Could it be robbing me of my power by shutting down the nerves in my leg? Could I be lacking blood supply to my lower back? Even worse, might I be psychologically holding back for fear of injury, and was my mind imposing a huge, unavoidable barrier to performance?

The actual cause of my trouble, a 25 MPH headwind, didn't really occur to me at the time, even as I was blowing the doors off other riders on the road.

Such is the staying power of our calamities. Their after effects linger on long after the body has healed. You can try to ignore them all you want, but the most abstract effects of a major individual disaster linger on even after the body is healed, and it's tough mental work to be rid of them.

This last Saturday, on the FBS shop ride, I celebrated Liberation Day.

There was only a small handful of us out for the ride, which turned out to be 28 or so miles with maybe four stretches of 5-6 minutes spent on the rivet. There weren't any monsters on the ride except Seibold, but we kept a brisk pace. The first time Jon ratched up the speed, I was worried about holding on. It didn't seem possible. Yet I did, and actually kept pace up one of the kickers on the ride that normally softens my legs pretty bad.

With that little achievement under my belt, I held on as one of the guys took a pull, took my own pull, and eased to the back. Soon enough, Jon had opened a big gap, and after killing myself to close the gap, I enjoyed another little achievment.

Again, no big thing. None of us on the ride are race shape right now, and I doubt whether anybody was working that hard. But confidence is like a brick wall, you build it with one little brick at a time.

So it went for a couple more efforts. I did get dropped after a longish pull up a false flat, but the pace of the shop ride tends toward hard effort / regroup rhythms, and the group soft pedaled just a bit as I caught the tail.

Later on, Jon and I traded pulls down Piney Orchard, not exactly setting the world on fire, but keeping the pace brisk, at or above 25. Jon finished it up with a long effort, and my legs blew toward the end of the road, but it was the end of the ride and I didn't care.

My epiphany didn't occur there though. It actually occurred after the second big effort. One of the guys asked how my back was, and I told him truthfully, "I haven't thought about it today, until you asked just now." Nor did I think about it until after the ride.

The bulged disc isn't ever going to go away. In fact, I had to walk in a parade and stand around for a couple hours, and that sure made my back hurt some later in the day. But it wasn't an impediment to my riding, and more importantly it didn't slow my riding by erecting phony barriers in my mind.

I will need to do things to take care of my back for the rest of my life, but there's no reason it should function as a barrier to my riding; not as a physical barrier, and not as a mental barrier. It's just an environmental factor now that I need to take into account and deal with, just like a little glass on the road or a quartering wind.

So screw it, man. Let's just ride.