Incredibly Banged Up
by:John
After a gruelling day of huffing and puffing up the mountains of the Scottish Highlands on a mountain bike, and then shooting down their winding paths, the state of my body is quite sad. I mean, forget about the fact that the tops of my thighs went into shock after being forced in to a continuous push up a 45 degree slope that didn’t seem to end. That alone would definitely leave me quite sore. But that is not even close to being the most painful thing on my body right now. Which is rather surprising when I remember getting off the bike to walk up the rest of the mountain and the muscles on the top of my legs recoiled into a little ball in a paralysing cramp. This prevented me from fully straightening my legs, and as I hobbled along stiff legged, I thought for sure I wouldn’t be walking normal for weeks.
But, oddly enough it’s not my legs, nor is it my arms, which have been acting as shock absorbers for the downhill flights. They are definitely sore. But what really hurts is the ribs.
That is definitely because I had a couple nice wrecks. I’ve always figured that if I don’t crash a couple times, I’m not trying hard enough. Well, as I crashed about a half a dozen times… no one can tell me I didn’t try hard enough. I won’t bother with a blow by blow of each of my tree smasher stories. I’ll just let you know that at the end of it, I was covered in mud, both of my calves were bloodied up from the pedals and branches, I was limping, breathing heavy and had a massive smile on my dirty face. It was a ton of fun. And, to top it all off, they were nicknaming me “wounded soldier”. I had a ball!