September 11, 2020 – The twelfth blog in The RestorationAge

First of all, look at that date y’all. If someone hasn’t mentioned it today, check that date. It scares the hell out of me. Forget about your Friday the 13th; today combines the anniversary date of the worst and most horrifying US terrorism event anyone born before this date in 2001 has ever experienced with the year 2020, arguably the most bizarre and stressful year in our lives. That’s some bad juju.

Sorry to call attention to it, but when I typed it out (I’m writing this on the 9th), it hit me. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that none of you experience any bad luck today. Luckily for me, my bad luck for the week happened last weekend.

All last week I was gearing up for a crazy, jam-packed weekend. It’s amazing how you can have nothing going on and then suddenly the calendar fills up and spills over. There were rides to be done, dinner with Louisville family, a cookout with our Ohio family, a visit with our West Virginia family, a cyclocross race, and a much needed Ian visit on tap – oh and did I mention that it was our 24th wedding anniversary on Monday?

I’m usually the Admin queen, but am out of practice and it all seemed overwhelming, but I got a plan in place and if everything went according to plan, we were in for an awesome weekend. I kept reminding myself to enjoy each moment, not to focus on the weekend as a whole. And it was all was going like clockwork, until 38 miles into our bike ride on Sunday morning.

I won’t go into any gory details, but I crashed. It was a dumb accident in some powdery sand/gravel at the bottom of a hill. There was someone calling out gravel followed by a split second before hitting the ground with the knowledge of what’s about to happen. Thankfully I didn’t take anyone else down, but that didn’t stop the amount of “Are you fu**ing kidding me?” that I was feeling in the moment. “Why today?” ran through my head many times. There was a plan and this was NOT in the plan.

This is where the fork was firmly planted in the road and I had to make a decision. Am I going to freak out or am I going to make this shit work? I am a most determined person, so my goal was to make it work. The weekend was tight enough as it was with health on my side, so here I was, probably needing stitches and encouraging Mike to pour the hydrogen peroxide on, steri strip me, and let’s hit the road. Obviously if my injuries had been severe enough (and you know instinctively when that is), plans would have changed, but I’ve been through this dance before and knew there was no way around just dealing with the fallout. Wrap it up, slap some Advil in me, and ask me how I’m doing in a week.

This is the thing. Life isn’t predictable. And if you think things are hard already, hold onto your hat, cause life’s just getting started. The thing we have to keep in mind is that the situation is only really defined by our reaction to it. Our reaction will either make us sink or swim. It’s okay to be mad or sad or in pain, but pick yourself up and get back on your bike. When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

With some understanding, we made all of our commitments for the weekend. Doing the second half of the long weekend with road rash, bruises, and swollen body parts was a huge bummer, but the feelings of gratitude that it wasn’t worse and that I could ride home after quickly replaced all emotion of feeling sorry for myself. I’m still in healing mode, but getting better every day. It wasn’t my plan, but it is now definitely the plan for the next few weeks. Meet your challenges with grace and patience and be the boss of them, not the other way around.

Keep safe this September 11th, 2020. I’m going to be over here drinking lemonade from the lemons handed to me this week. Followed by beer, of course. I’ll be back next week, tagaderm-free.

LLM