Race number one! Lets try Again!

I have arrived at another night before the race and again I am feeling “good” and “ready to race.” I put these in quotes because my fitness and preparedness is good and ready to race however my body is still recovering from a fairly traumatic crash.

Three days after crashing at the Mooloolaba world cup I was still finding new bruises, sore spots and road rash. I found that I had a bruised rib after trying to do tumble turns in the pool once arriving into New Plymouth, New Zealand. I found a little more road rash on the back of my knee and hip as well as a deep bruise on the top of my hipbone and shoulder blade.

With this all tallied up and accounted for my road rash has significantly improved, some even completely healed. A thanks goes to my friend Rodeena at the Noosa Hospital for checking my wounds and supplying what is now the best thing ever for road rash. It is self-adhesive breathable protecting gauze that you leave on up to 7 days and the skin repairs itself underneath. It rocks!

My bruises and tightness have settled after a massage on Friday morning with some Arnica to help the tissues repair. Having not done a 40km bike and 10km hard run last week I don’t have the damage from racing to recover from…just crashing at 45km/hr.

I have been receiving mixed reviews on my sprained/fractured wrist and have seen the Kiwi National team doctor for a third review. He believes it could be a fracture of a scaphoid as my sore wrist and swelling has improved but the small area at the base of the thumb (some thing some thing snuff box, can’t remember) is still very tender and hasn’t improved. The Kiwi doc seems to think I can race as long as I don’t do anything more traumatic to it…please don’t kick me in the hand fellas! So I will be going for an X-ray on Monday morning before I leave to Ishigaki, Japan on Wednesday morning. If it is fractured, I may have to give the next two races a miss in order to get my wrist plastered and fixed for World Champs.

Other then these small details, I can swim hard with only some achy ness in my wrist and riding is fine as long as I don’t sprint out of the saddle…No Problem…there’s only a few hills on the course so I can suck it up for those. And running of course I feel great and look forward to finally putting down a good run off the bike to start the season.

Here’s to a second attempt and race number one!