Slow Down?-Maybe later

Two and a half weeks ago, I endo’d on a black run,”Rainmaker”, at the Winter Park downhill track. I broke several ribs and “did something” to my right thumb. I’ve been moving as possible and worked out on my regular schedule this week but used progressions with most exercises. I realized there is a fair amount of soft tissue injury as well. I still can’t swing a golf club for example and range of motion on stretching is limited. However, I have stretched or moved, lifted weights or walked or biked at least to the grocery since two days post injury.

So what did I learn from the experience? First, I fell not because I am too old to be down hill mountain biking; not yet anyway. I fell because I didn’t adjust my brake levers closer to my fingers which caused excessive reach and speed and I was unable to feather the brakes on the run. Second, I haven’t been riding a lot and I was tired. Comparable to the end of day Jerry run in skiing when once per year skiers get hurt. Do we take longer to heal longer as we get into middle age? The answer to that is a bit mixed. Some research indicates that as you get older, your bones heal within the same time range as when you were younger. However, other risks come into play; specifically morbidity risk of pneumonia goes up specifically with age when healing from broken ribs. Middle aged adults in an inactive society have more co-morbidity that impacts healing. More than one thing wrong with us, and for the inactive, often it is metabolic and muscular weaknesses and creates a propensity to injury; the slippery slope of inactivity. So, taking it easy as we get older, to me, creates conditions to be injured rather than preventing it.

For me, I am active, the injury could and would have been much worse if that was not the case. The difficulty of healing as we age is not the time to heal so much as it is taking the time to properly encourage healing and doing the work is more difficult when we are older because we are encouraged not to move and often to busy to do the work of healing. SO, I will return to down hill mountain biking, but next summer as fall riding and climbing season is nearly upon us and I want to be ready for that.