On Broken Bones, Lacerated Kidneys, Remembering and Forgetting

My right kidney has now gone fifty-two weeks without having two splintered ribs rudely pushed into it.  I gotta say, it's been a good day year.

The crash itself had a disorienting effect on my 2011 season in a number of ways.  It happened at my first cat 3 race, Quabbin Reservoir Road Race, and at the time, seemed like it stalled my racing momentum.  It ended my research stay at Yale a week early, and it defined my time in Worcester the following month.  It made me an offer I couldn't refuse:  give up sitting up comfortably for a month, and you'll get all the sympathy and BAMF cred you want with non-cyclists.

It didn't really disrupt my training plan--I was already between plans (ironically, where I find myself again), and in the end it meant I simply spent hours annoying the Gold's Gym spin-class leaders with my refusal to "Yay!  Really hammer now!" and, later, sweating enormous pollen-ringed puddles every morning on the deck of the American Antiquarian Society's beautiful guest house.  But afterward, crits seemed insanely punchy and fast after two months being neither, and every so often after races or long training rides, I could hear my ribs telling me about the time they got cracked in half and pushed into my kidney.

If last season was about remembering the crash, most of the offseason I spent forgetting it--I got to start over in a new place, tell the story a few times ("and that's why I'm not playing basketball in the offseason") and move on with a real off-season.  Once the interminable afternoon calls to insurers and medical billing were over, there wasn't much to remember.  Besides, maybe, the random and only mildly alarming facts that I have a duplicate Inferior Vena Cava and an unidentified mass in my left inguinal canal.

The last few weeks, though, have been season of remembering:  Easter weekend came earlier this year than last, so I celebrated my crash's liturgical anniversary by (what else?) driving 9 hours and then racing.  At Battenkill last week, Harry Zernike handed me a copy of the beautifully-produced issue 3 of 9W magazine, featuring interleaved firsthand accounts of the Quabbin Reservoir Road Race, including my crash report.  It's a nice feature, focusing on the ways in which epic nasty conditions that day sent various riders to idling cars, McDonald's bathrooms, and emergency rooms.

And today is the calendar anniversary, another occasion to contemplate the relationship between remembering and forgetting. I guess I don't mind remembering, especially if Milan Kundera was right when he wrote "Remembering is not the negative of forgetting.  Remembering is a form of forgetting."

(I'll have to tap Kundera for a quote again sometime when I need to ponder the Unbearable Lightness of Climbing)