Friday, January 7, 2011

the mental side of crashing

In the past couple of years, I've had my ass kicked a couple of times. I had a car accident in 2008, then my bike wreck this past spring. In both cases, I got a helicopter ride to MetroHealth.

I bounced back pretty quickly mentally and physically both times. The car wreck involved a few months for the bones to heal and a year and a half to rebuild my atrophied quads. The bike wreck only injured my hands, so the recovery time was relatively quick.

In both cases, my main focus was to get back to riding, and I didn't even think about the mental trauma that I suffered. For example, after the car wreck, I started driving again right away without a worry. And I thought the bike wreck was mainly just annoying. Once I got my hand out of a hard cast, I was back to normal life, aka racing and training.

In retrospect, I just avoided thinking about how those two incidents shook me up since I was so focused on getting past the physical injury part. But after a recent event--the details I'll omit--I'm pretty sure that the trauma I suffered altered my perspective in some inconvenient ways that came back to bite me. Yeah, it's vague, but I don't want to get too personal in my bike blog!

So, the lesson I'd take away from this is it's probably not such a bad idea to try to get a handle on the mental part of recovering from an accident once the physical recovery is done.

2 comments:

Jim said...

Not at all sure what it means but I hope all is well.

Kevin Kimmich said...

Yeah no major problems. I just realized the sort of stress I experienced as a result of those injuries can catch up with you when you least expect it.

Post a Comment