This was a bad week to separate my shoulder
So, I crippled myself last weekend and pretty much trashed my chances of riding in Orrando’s spring 400 (which is about as flat as a 400 can be in Oregon – only two 20%+ ramps, and they’re very short.) Okay, fine, so I’m out of luck there and my project for the year (to do two brevet series – one in workers rides) will need to have some serious schedule tweaks to make it work.
So lets see what 400s are nearby and available.
The Desert River region has one which does not cost an arm and/or a leg. But it’s on 26 May, which falls right on top of the Forest Grove-Vernonia populaire, which not only am I volunteering for but which I volunteered to run the start/finish control. So that’s out.
Seattle has one on 18 Aug, which is conveniently one week before Orrando’s summer 600k (which I’m volunteering for, and might be preriding that week.) And it costs $85, plus the cost of getting to whereever in Washington it starts/ends, plus the cost of hotel rooms.
And if I panic and start looking elsewhere, I run headlong into the detail of nobody really has any summer/fall 400s. SFrando has one in July, but it conflicts with a 3 day tour I’m taking to celebrate a friends birthday, and another of the California regions has a 400 on September 1 (which is doable, but any California-based 400 would cost a lot of money to get to, hotel at, and enter.)
I’d gone to a lot of trouble to arrange my schedule to make room for a pair of series this year (it’s really hard, because my family, not surprisingly, starts making snarky comments about rando widowhood when I start lunging for the horizon every weekend) and even if I submit and get one of my 400s approved I can’t just ride it because permanents don’t count as the proper secret handshake for a series.
Golly, that’s inconvenient.
After 5 days off the bike I snapped and rode about 12 miles on Friday, 60 miles yesterday, and another 12 miles today and didn’t have any ill effects (aside from reinforcing that it’s really unpleasant to have the distal end of my clavicle rubbing laviciously around on top of the point of my shoulder when it should be tucked under that point providing structural support when I need to punch my way up a ramp or sprint to catch up with the friends who dropped me on the previously mentioned ramp) so it is theoretically possible that I could ride a 400 and then fill in the gaps between then and the 600 with strategically placed 200s, but the failure case (running out of steam/drugs/workable shoulder 190km down the valley, needing to cool my heels for 12 hours in the Eugene Amtrak station before catching train #500 at 5:30am Sunday morning, then hearing “I told you so!” from my supportive family for approximately the next 30 years :-) ) is a little daunting.
Now I’ve not actually seen the xrays of the damage to my shoulder, but it (thanks, I think, to going up to Crown Point yesterday) has gotten a lot better since the accident (to the point where I’m not wearing the sling and can type with two hands. I still don’t have any strength in my right arm, nor can I reliably lift it above shoulder height) and it might be dimly possible to at least start the 400 and turn back at Silverton if it turns out that 50 miles is about as far as I can go in one go (Silverton is also, coincidentally, where the road first tilts upwards fairly severely and is where I would be dropped by my friends even if I was bolting downvalley at the pace I was going on the 300 – if I couldn’t keep up with them on the valley floor, there’s no way I could keep up with them on the hilly parts between there and the nuclear free summit on Brush Creek Road.)
I’m going to see an osteopath on Monday, so maybe I’ll bring this up and see what expert advice has to say about it, because I’d really hate to not have a 2×SR year this year :-(
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I gotta figure the bad failure case isn’t DNF-ing at 50 miles; it’s falling on that same shoulder again.
Might-maybe want to check the plausible range of outcomes from that with the osteopath? I can’t imagine it’s any kind of good.