Aborted long ride... more injury time.

So the Boomtown Rats were right. Even when it comes to public holidays.

It was all looking very promising. After having been out last night to the first Rugby League Grand Final I've ever managed to score tickets to (thanks to my awesome brother) and seeing my team Manly thrash the Storm I was on a bit of a high. However I managed to reign it in and still get to bed at a decent hour, in anticipation of a nice long 160km+ this morning.

Slept beautifully, the day dawned with low cloud cover, no rain and a beautiful 18 degrees. Perfect riding weather. I got all my gear together, made some sandwiches and cleaned the bike chain, then rolled up the street, ready to meet the guys half an hour later in Roseville.

5 minutes later, just a few blocks from my house, POW!!! The back tube blew. Brand new tyres and everything. So I managed to do the 5 minute tube change, was wrestling whether to waste time with the hand pump, then I thought "Damn I've got a C0 2 cannister, they cost 6 bucks each, but at this point in the morning I don't want to waste 10 minutes pumping and be way late meeting the group, plus I'd rather have a full 120psi in the tyre for such a long ride, rather than whatever I can force in by hand". Reasoning that it was worth the money I fired up the cannister, jumped back on my bike and thought I'd ride a block to make sure the tyre held out then text the guys to tell them I'd be a few mins late.

Strangely, straight away my right knee felt weird. All swollen up and painful. It had been totally fine when I left the house 5 minutes previously. It was like at the exact moment of the tube change me knee blew. Whatever the reason, there was nothing I could do. I could barely ride up the slight incline of the Pacific Highway so about 100m later I stopped and realised that trying to do 160km on the knee would NOT be a good idea. I texted the boys, turned around and came back home to strap on an icepack and have a whine on my blog.

I guess it's a good lesson in what i'm trying to cultivate at the moment - flexibility of mind. My mental plan of how things should have happened was me getting in a great long ride and the conditions were perfect, except for the sudden knee thing. Suffering comes from me being too attached to this mental map and feeling upset that reality didn't accord with it. But that's life right? Why do we go through life expecting that things will turn out as we'd planned and then acting shocked when they don't and spending all this time and mental energy regretting and being annoyed by it.

The clear evidence (well of the last 30 -odd years of my experience anyway) is that more often than not, things don't turn out exactly as we'd planned / predicted. I've just got to get better at letting go of the mental plan. It's not working right now - I'm crabby! Think we'll go to Ikea instead and shop those blues away...