Mountain Biking Injuries Suck and Hurt!

Two weeks ago,  I made the huge rookie cycling mistake of making a sudden move on some large, sharp gravel.  Boy did I pay a serious price.  Badly jammed right thumb, serious abrasions on my left elbow and a 4" long cut and bruise the size of an ostrich egg on my left hip.


My brain already knew that riding a bike on gravel was about the same as driving a car on ice.  No sudden movements of any kind or something really bad can happen.  Since I'm still trying to recover from that lapse in judgement, I'm hoping that it wont ever happen again.

The injured right thumb made it impossible to operate my rear derailleur so I was off bike riding for a while... no idea how long  The thumb injury also made it impossible for me to do my Banish Fat Boost Metabolism Jillian Michaels DVD, push ups or anything else that I needed my whole right hand to do.  Tried my jump rope and some of the simple lower body exercises that I learned from the Jillian Michaels DVDs but the bruise on my hip would not tolerate that much directional movement.

Schwinn 238 Exercise Bike

Thank God for my recumbent bike.  Even though I wasn't out on the road, I could still manage to spin.  I was happy to discover that the recumbent crank would accept my clip in pedals off of my bike so I could more closely approximate riding my real bike.  It wasn't completely pain free... my hip would really hurt when I got off the bike and tried to walk around after the work out and it's not nearly as much fun as the real thing but at least I got to watch a few old favorite movies (Bringing Down The House and Princess Bride to name a few) and get in some serious pedal time.  I discovered I could still do all of my ab workouts, squats and discovered doing strait and side planks on my elbows (great core exercise).