First off, my foot is feeling pretty much “healed.” After a couple days, I remembered that my previous “tendon pain” from running was happening on the inside edge of my foot and not the outside edge where the pain from bicycling was happening. After talking to our trainer again and letting him know that it was real tender first thing in the morning, he thought it was probably plantar fasciitis, especially since it wasn’t an “old” injury from running. So after a few days, I’m feeling good as new.
But instead of taking it easy, I decided to do something different: go mountain bike trail riding. So, I joined the Abilene Bicycle Club this week and went out to their local trail to see if my Target-special mountain bike could hold up out there. Well, I’d like to blame it on the bike, but I think it was my fault that I ended up with a souvenir:
It looks pretty nasty, but most of that is just blood that ran down my leg. I ended up getting four stitches at the walk-in clinic down the road. I’m sure it gonna be nice and tender in the morning. I crashed at “The Gully” about 20 minutes into my hour-long ride. I probably would have quit sooner, but I didn’t know the trail well enough to make a quick return. So, I ended up riding most of the trail (excluding the extremely technical area).
It looks like I had a bad day, but it was really a lot of fun. If I had a real mountain bike, it probably would have been a lot more fun. And maybe some knee pads. I doubt I got as good of a workout as running would have been, but I was working pretty hard. I’ll probably take a week off from a doing much athletic work while my stitches do their job, but after that, I hope to go ride again.
