My grandfather was a rancher. When he interviewed a potential employee he often asked them to empty their pockets. If they had a knife, a piece of string, and a nail they were hired. So I learned at an early age to carry all the essentials in my pockets. It has served me well as I’ve been able to fix hundreds of things over the years with what I had in my pockets.

Mountain bike shorts are great because they have lots of pockets – or are they?? There’s nothing quite so invigorating as carving through roots and turns on a downhill singletrack, which is what I was doing pre-riding the end of the Beaver Creek Xterra course. So when the trail popped out of the trees at the bottom of the ski run I was cruising, stoked, and not at all prepared for a hard right turn back toward the trees. I was even less prepared for the 4” post right after the turn arrow. I’d laid it over a little late for the turn and added a little more to avoid hitting the post. Both tires slid out on the dry, smooth, sandy-gravelly trail.
Down I went before the post and the first thing I felt was my cell phone. Safe in my pocket, horizontal, and just below my hip it formed a perfect fulcrum to concentrate the force of the fall on my femur just below the neck. Check out the CT scan picture of the resultant break. Being an old cell phone it was undamaged. My wallet was in my other pocket, and more damage was headed its way. So far the hospital is over $40,000, surgeons over $7,000, ambulance $1,300, anesthesiologist $3,000. Add physical therapy and follow-ups to that. I’m not into moralizing and it is out of style, anyway, but the moral of the story is, Don’t carry hard stuff in your pockets while riding. At my first follow-up the doctor said I’d never do another triathlon. I fired him, but a premature end to the season, a long recovery, and major bills are awful prices to pay for carrying the wrong thing in a pocket. Be careful out there!

Bruce Wacker, 2008 Xterra World Champion 60-64.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Athlete Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.