Heartbreak

I took the new bike out yesterday for her maiden voyage on a slower paced group ride I usually do on Saturday mornings.  The bike is amazing!  It's incredibly fast, light and aerodynamic.  I could feel the bike wanting to go faster, and the faster I rode it, the better it performed.  It's incredibly sleek, so it slices through the wind with little resistance.

Everything was going great until I had to slam on the brakes to avoid crashing into a woman who turned too sharply in front of me.  In my effort to avoid crashing into her, I pulled too hard on the front brake and flipped forward over the handle bars.  My first thought was, "Oh no, I just wrecked my brand new bike on it's first ride."

After scraping myself off the concrete, I put my rear wheel back into position (the impact was so hard, the rear wheel popped out) and gave my bike a quick look over.  Everything seemed to be in order with no major damage to the bike, but my wrists hurt.  A minute or two later, my left wrist really began to hurt.  I clipped back into my bike to put a little weight on my wrist to see if I could continue the ride.  No bueno, the left wrist was done.

Luckily, the wreck couldn't have happened at a better spot.  The ride is 42 miles in distance and I went down at the spot about as close to my house as possible--just one mile away.  I hopped back on my bike and limped home.  Shannon took me to the ER for x-rays and sure enough: It's broken.

The bone to the outside of the wrist is broken.  Notice the emblem in the top-right corner of the x-ray.  It looks eerily similar to the Ironman logo.  Coincidence?

They put me in this splint until I see an orthopedic specialist this week where I'll have it casted.  The ER doc said he thinks I'll be in the cast for 6-8 weeks.  This incident throws a major wrench in my training for the White Lake race on April 6.  I feel confident I'll be able to run and cycle with a cast, but the swimming and weightlifting is out of the question.

I'm not going to let this injury stop me from training and completing White Lake.  I'll have less time to train, but that just means I'll have to train much harder after I've recovered.