MiND oVer MisHaP

Returning to cycling after a crash involves not only healing the body but also calming the mind. Dr Marianne Trent explores the psychology of getting back on

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At the end of April this year, my nine-year-old and I were living our best lives – enjoying the sights and sounds of a Sunday cycle around a country park. Then, without warning, my front wheel slid on a damp strip at the edge of the path – as unspectacular as it was unexpected. Time seemed to slow down as it dawned on me I was about to hit the deck. My left arm bore the brunt, and later at the hospital an x-ray showed I’d fractured the radial head. After eight weeks off the bike, getting back on proved much more difficult than I expected – and now, as a clinical psychologist, I want to understand why.

The mood changes set in early on. For the first two weeks after the accident, I was sad, irritable, scared of everyone and everything, wanting either to comfort-eat chocolate or to cry. In the third week, I switched to work mode and started to think like a trauma therapist – to treat myself analytically and compassionately as I would treat a client. It was at this point I resolved that, over the remainder of my recovery, I would develop a guide to returning to cycling from injury. Here is what I learnt…

 Shock factor 

“While we cyclists know that crashes happen, when they happen to us, they are always a surprise,” said Dr Victor Thompson, clinical sports psychologist (sportspsychologist.com). Partly it is this ‘out of the blue on an ordinary day’ phenomenon that makes certain crashes so tricky to recover from. “Most days we don’t crash, so our expectation is that, on any given day, we will almost certainly be OK,” added Thompson.