Spinalinjury

The year I wasn’t going to fall off my bike / El año en que no me iba a caer de la bicicleta

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Somehow this appears to have fallen off the blog, so I’m republishing it.  Apologies if you’ve read it before.  Originally posted around 19 Sept 2019.

Since 2012 I’ve cycled more than 20,000 km around the UK and Europe on roads and bike trails. I’ve struggled up brutal Alpine climbs and, on occasion, plugged in my headphones for tedious flat rides along the side of European rivers. I’ve managed to do this without incurring any significant injury riding my touring bike, a collection of road bikes and an old bike for negotiating Edinburgh’s cobbled streets and tram tracks. […]

Beginning

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It’s now the beginning of September 2019. At the end of April, I entered a closed-road cycling event along with around 8000 other people. The plan was to cycle a hundred miles across the beautiful mountains and roads of Majorca. The plan didn’t quite work out. I ended up in hospital with a vertebrate high on my spine broken into three pieces and my spinal cord severed. It was a freak accident I was very unlucky to sustain and even luckier to survive. I require a ventilator to breathe today. […]