Broken ribs

Well, I'm off my bike for the moment. I got out of the shower last Friday morning and realised that my rib was making a clicking noise when I pushed it in a certain way. I went and had an x-ray done on Saturday and got the results back yesterday. It turns out I have two broken ribs. The GP advised that I shouldn't be riding at all, partly to aid recovery but mostly because of the risk factor. If I fell again on an already damaged and vulnerable rib, I could end up puncturing a lung or suffering pneumothorax (collapsed lung) or chest flail (a bit of rib breaking loose), which can be life threatening. In hindsight going for a long ride in the hills last weekend probably wasn't that sensible, but I thought the ribs were just bruised at the time. Clearly I should have (yet again) listened to my wife and had an x-ray done straight after the accident. Needless to say, she has reminded me of this fact a number of times.

Anyway, the doctor has successfully put the wind up me and I've decided to stay off the bike for another four weeks or so while it heals. I'm pretty peeved about the whole situation as I'll miss the Velo Adelaide ride on Sunday. I've done a fair bit of hills riding over the past few months or so in preparation for the ride and I was hoping to achieve my goal of doing the 110km ride in the same time it took me to do the 80km ride last year. I suppose there's no reason why I can't do it when I've recovered - it just would have been nice to do it on the day with all those closed roads, the support, the feed stations etc.

I'm also annoyed because I really feel like I've started to make some progress over the past month (improving times up some of my regular climbs by 10 - 20%) and I was hoping to keep pushing it along. However, the thing that mostly gives me the shits is that I didn't even get the satisfaction of venting my spleen at the fuckwit driver that caused this. There's not a whole lot I can do about it now - I guess I'll just dust off the trainer and keep riding in the safety of my shed.