imsparticus wrote:
devashish_paul wrote:
Just move on. The past is the past relative to anything in life. You can only affect the present....lots of good days in the present makes for an awesome future....but just focus on now. The past is done. Got run over a bus in 2018.
No point having that hold me back. It is what it is, impairments and psychological scars and all.
Most respectfully Dev, you say "
no point having that hold me back." What's so wrong with learning from mistakes. So many of us have been severely injured riding. I used to ride with a small group on a trail closed to vehicular traffic. At some point, more than half of us left that trail in an ambulance. I now do the vast majority of my riding indoors. You might say my fear of serious injury is
holding me back, and you would be right. But I see it as learning from mistakes. It is a mathematical certainty that
if you ride outside long enough, you will crash and die. Just a fact.OK OK...I agree that the more we ride outside the more we expose ourselves to risks associated with crashing, but it is not a fact that we will crash and die. I have literally ridden for 50 years now, and only had two serious crashes. Most of my crashes were in years zero to 8 of riding then nothing for 30 years and two in the last 12. It could easily be zero in the last 42 years too, and the next 30 could be zero or 60 crashes. But it is not a fact we will die from riding too much, but 100 percent a fact we will die just from living and being born (someone curse our parents for bringing us into this world and destining us to death and taxes)
In any case incidence of crashing and injury on any road at any time is a predetermined probability. You can be on "this patch of road" from 3-3:15 pm on Friday the 13th of July (insert year) and you and I will have the same probability of getting hit. That's constant. The more we ride, we just expose ourselves to that probability more often, but the probability at that instant does not increase....we just exposed ourselves to more instances of the probability, but it does not go up at 3:16 pm because it was riding from 3-3:15. I could be in bed from 3-3:15 or riding from 3-3:15 but my odds of getting hurt at 3:16 are identical regardless of what I did previously. It is not based on how much I rode before that moment (there is no cross correlation between previous time blocks and this one...each one is a new risk block).
In any case, we will likely go in circles about riding more resulting in eventual death. Living more in the basement also results in eventual death (we all die). So it is an individual choice in what we choose to do for the rest of life. In previous years, I would XC ski in all kinds of crazy dangerous conditions on technical trails etc etc. In probably around 40,000km of XC skiing, I have broken one ankle. So really my personal stats bear out that this is a low risk activity going down single track hills at 60kph in the forest, but I no longer like the concept of recovery from falls, so I restrict my XC skiing to really benign courses. I only bike out roads with smooth tarmac with lots of bail out room and I try to ride when there is less traffic (all in an effort to put the stats of catastrophy in my favour). But yes, there is risk and it is perfectly OK to not want to take those risks AT ALL. I choose to continue to take those risks....at 70.3 Worlds I was descending back into St. George at 75kph, when I got passed by a 25 year old probably going around 90kph....my instinct was to race and ride the top tube, because "its a race and every second is a second saved"....but who was I fooling, because as soon at T2 came, I would barely be shuffling at 6 min per km, making a 10 second savings on the descent worthless. For a moment, my instinct said, "it's a race and it is on"...then my brain kicked in and said, "you have to get back to work and family on Monday, and you no longer race for position, just for social and enjoyment, so back it waaaay off". So I get where you are coming from, but is this "learning" or is it simply, "the reward does not exceed the perceived risk and perceived probability of a bad outcome".
I personally don't ride in the rain anymore other than if it happens in a race. I know how to ride in the rain and don't need to practice it anymore and deal with the lack of enjoyment and also additional risk....no need to add a "risk exposure block" to my like...basement and rouvy is plenty fine.
I think learning from crashes in terms of biking handling skills and also assessing risk profiles of riding in certain times and scenarios are useful learning exercises. How that changes your personal riding, that's up to you, but regardless, it does not really matter what any of our crashes were, we have to move into the future putting the crashes behind. Learning from them moving to the future is good. Limiting what we do IF we want to do things because of fear of a bad outcome is a personal choice. Sounds like the OP wants to keep riding outside, so in that case, I say, "move on and put it in the rear view mirror...control the present, don't be limited by the past" (if you don't want to be limited)
Dev