After a sucessfull recovery from a broken collar bone I was feeling pretty motivated and had a good month of racing lined up.
Cristmas was spent with the family in the hawkes bay with some hunting, fishing and plenty of riding, while I wasn't feeling super fast on the bike I knew abit of racing would have me good for nationals then the tour of wellington, so first up was the tour de vinyards in nelson, a good fun tour but with a high calibre of riders, 40mins into the first stage there was comotion up infront of me, I looked up to see riders heading into the ditch, hitting the anchors to avoid it all was my reaction, unfortunately this wasn't the same from some riders behind me as I was rear ended at full gas, i stood up...look at my knee...and knew I was out, I hobbled over to the side of the road and lay down in a pool of emotion, angry, frustrated and confused at what had just happened.
Into the ambo and off to the hospital to get cleaned up, the knee took 9 stitches and an x-ray to my hand showed a chipped scaphoid. Into a cast i went and a knee i couldn't bend, although i was relativley pain free at that stage by night things had settled and the pain was cripling, a wee trip at 5am to get some pain killers and I finally got some sleep.
I stayed with the team for the tour then went on down to christchurch for more checkups. By this stage more problems had come up, my jaw(another story altogether...it has a hole in it) got infected and so did my leg, so a course of IV antibiotics was administerd, 3 weeks later, im still trying to get some movement into the knee and feel unsure how long that will take.
Staying with the team was a good move, most of the guys have had some injury of some kind and the support they gave was invaluable, after initially feeling pretty down I am very peacefull and unshaken which is good considering the amount of time I have to just sit pondering and thinking about the important things in life.
Next step...get on the windtrainer...rebuild some strength...see what happens...the team has gained UCI Continental status and we are all go to head to the states mid march.
Bring it on.
