The Big Deal.
On August 4, 2009, I was having fun riding with my grandson and everything was going GREAT! One second later, I swerved to keep from running into him, fell and broke both of my elbows. I've been screwed up every since.
The following February Mrs. Grouch suggested that, if I wasn't up to riding conventional bikes, we would have to either switch to recumbents or find different lifestyle. Switching to recumbents hasn't come easily for the grouch. Every tiny little detail has been an issue - getting started smoothly is a biggie, looking side-to-side for traffic is more difficult, drinking while moving, even shifting is a little different. I had a terrible time getting acclimated to my new SWB recumbent and I'm still not completely there. If riding a single recumbent was bad, trying to ride a tandem recumbent was doubly difficult. We seriously struggled.
All this adversity has been messing with my head. Several times Mrs. Grouch and I drove our Screamer tandem somewhere, assembled it to ride, and I freaked out and simply wasn't able to do it. I continued to struggle and had around 10 sessions with a Psychologist. I did make some progress and was able to complete several 50 mile rides last Summer, but I never regained that carefree feeling that I used to have when I rode. We continued to struggle with the tandem. We drove 35 miles for a ride on Mother's Day 2011, and never even got launched. We did a major Tombay and I got a serious concussion. We continued to try and attempted the same ride on Labor Day. Nearing the end we caught a wheel on the edge of the trail, fell and I broke my femur.
I haven't had a doctor's diagnosis of PTSD, but I'm pretty sure that I've got it. I rode this morning and did pretty well but, on my way to the ride, I could feel the tension growing in my arms and shoulders. I'm convinced that the anxiety and tension has contributed to all of the falls that I've had since the elbow incident. The question is: how to eliminate that anxiety and tension? I've visited a Psychologist but didn't feel she did me very much good. Maybe a different Psychologist would be better. "Getting back on the horse" hasn't been working very fell for me. So far I haven't tried any medications. As I posted in another thread, the most successful thing has been "EFT" as practiced by my son-in-law.
So that's the big deal. You don't get to 20,000 posts on a bicycling board unless bicycling is a pretty significant part of your lifestyle. Right now that part of my life isn't going so well and I'd like to get it back.