Out on ‘The Tractor’ today and I reached that stage of tiredness where mounting starts to become a problem. A long length of muddy undulating single-track with undulations which seemed to have the same radius as my wheel! All the little mistakes and corrections started to pile up until preparation for the next obstacle was impossible because I was still surviving the last one. Then I rose in my saddle to clear a bump, a split second before my saddle rose that bit further…
My diagnosis is bispherical haematoma. :0(
Then I was riding up and over a sandy gravelly hump, and as I cleared the crest, my left foot slipped off the pedal. Somehow, my foot went underneath and behind the wheel, but the left pedal was braced against the back of my left calf. I couldn’t move my left leg because my foot was trapped. I couldn’t free my foot because my leg was trapped…
My right foot hit the ground, and I tried to stop falling full length by hopping. The wheel was locked because my leg was braced against the (pinned) pedal, but it was trying to turn because the uni was sliding down the gravel slope. As I hopped, of course, the load on the pedal increased and decreased rhythmically, driving those pins against my calf muscle with a mambo beat.
If I hadn’t been doing it for fun, I would have hated every minute of it.