Originally Posted by merlinextraligh
the risk of injury comes with the game. You have to decide if it's worth it. There will always be crashes. The higher up you go, they're just faster crashes.
Couple of observations:
1)If it gets you off the couch, i bet eliminating the sedentary lifestyle risk factor more than offsets the risk;
2)I think the risk of serious injury or death is lower racing, than just ridingon open roads;
3) Your personal risk goes down with experience. When I did this in my 20's my first 2 seasons I had several crashes; most of which were either my fault, or could have at least have been avoided with better skills. Now older, and hopefully a little wiser, I've had one crash in 20 races, and it was pretty minor.
1) There are plenty of less violent ways to get off the couch.
2) Even minor injuries can cause lost work time, especially for someone who needs both hands to be wound-free to do his job. Sure it's less severe than getting run over by a car, but I'm just as useless at work with a broken collarbone as I am sitting in a hospital bed.
3) I agree with this. I think that maybe, with some quick thinking and some better choices of line, I may have been able to ride around these crashes. I'm not sure, though. But I do agree that more experience can only help.
I'm not ready to tear up my racing license or anything, but I just wish that people placed more value on riding safely/intelligently than they do here in my local cat 4 peloton. I mean hell--there have been crashes just about every week in our training series this summer. That's a problem IMHO. How to fix it? I have no idea. But MABRA doesn't seem to care, the clubs don't really do anything (for the most part--our club has a skills and drills clinic every winter that I think is a good step, but not mandatory), and the sketchy unattached riders who get reported to officials continue to race.
Incidentally, I found out that the rider who landed on top of my frame last week and the rider who caused the crash I avoided this week was someone who was in the wrong cat to be racing the B race, but was allowed to because she's a "strong rider." This past week she went down after some contact, apparently while she was trying to put away a water bottle.