After a crash, how do I regain cornering confidence?
Question: While training for a century, I was turning left onto a well-used road … and down in some loose gravel. Somehow, I broke my thumb, which required surgery, three pins, a cast and physical therapy. I’ve taken plenty of tumbles over more than sixty years of cycling, but this has really spooked me, and I find myself cornering with care bordering on paranoia. Is there a tried-and-true method to regain my confidence in the simple operation of turning a corner? —Dan B.
RBR’S STAN PURDUM REPLIES: The standard answer is to take it slow and carefully until the jitters fade on their own. But when there’s been a traumatic injury — and don’t kid yourself, the damage to your thumb was traumatic — regaining confidence is even more difficult.
An injury is considered traumatic when sudden physical damage to the body is caused by an external force that requires immediate medical attention. “Trauma,” which comes from the Greek word for “wound,” is sneaky, for even after the physical wound is healed, the psychological wound can go marching on, rearing its ugly head to hamper your confidence when you are back in the saddle. People who study trauma tell us that for people affected by it, the past is not in the past, and that we can relive the terror of the past in the present.
What’s more, since you’ve been cycling for “more than sixty years,” you are likely now a senior citizen, which can add another layer of spookiness, knowing that injuries in our upper years can take longer to heal than when we were young, and that we may be one accident away from losing our independence.
Injurious crashes can cause us to obsess over what happened, replaying the crash sequence in our minds, which can trigger fear when we come to situations similar to those where we crashed — cornering, in your case. And since virtually every ride involves turning corners, the fear trigger is likely to keep firing for a while. I’m guessing that’s what you’ve described as “paranoia” while turning corners.
One thing you can do right away is to determine if any mistake on your part contributed to the accident. That will not always be the case, as some accidents are caused by factors beyond your control, such as the unexpected loose gravel you encountered. But if some misstep of your own was involved, learn from that and decide how you will handle a similar situation in the future.
For example, I’ve had two injurious accidents that were attributable to mistakes I made. One occurred because I slammed on the brakes while speeding downhill (road rash and a pulled groin muscle) and the other because I was paging through the screens on my bike computer when I should have been looking where I was going (broken collarbone and rib).
Importantly, don’t take your shaken confidence as a personal flaw. It’s a natural and not unexpected response to trauma. So, give yourself some time for your body, mind and emotions to heal. Some of that can be on-bike time, but don’t expect that the uneasiness with cornering will dissipate right away. Still, as many road cyclists can testify, the fear generally does gradually recede.
Stan Purdum has ridden several long-distance bike trips, including an across-America ride recounted in his book Roll Around Heaven All Day, and a trek on U.S. 62, from Niagara Falls, New York, to El Paso, Texas, the subject of his book Playing in Traffic. Stan, a freelance writer and editor, lives in Ohio. See more at www.StanPurdum.com.
