Weekend: Broken bones (not me) and more

I didn't end up swimming Friday evening. Too much to do!! Didn't end up getting to bed until nearly midnight either which was annoying!

Got up Saturday morning for the ride though and just went with the short group (with all the novices) as an "experienced rider" and because I wasn't sure if my legs were up to the medium group ride of Cotter/Uriarra yet!

They were a bit all over the place, but being at the front and leading the ride it was a bit hard to see what was going on behind me, and Murray at the back was hanging with the last rider who was dropping off fairly often so he wasn't able to do much yelling either (constructively of course!!).

We were about halfway through the ride when I heard the unmistakable sound of cyclists going down, then everyone was yelling "cyclists down" etc, so we all screamed to a stop, threw our bikes to the side of the road and went running back to the others.

At first glance everoyne was ok. Three went down - one had some impressive looking grazes all down her arms and legs, the other had taken some pretty big chunks out of the end of his fingertips, and the other was wandering around with not really a scratch. One of the guys front wheels wasn't turning properly so we fixed that up, started cleaning up grazes, and Natalie (who had been wandering around seemingly uninjured), suddenly said "I think my arm's a bit lumpy". Uh-oh. We all peered at her arm and it was certainly looking very swollen and definitely a bit lumpy! "Can you move your fingers?" "Kind of, hmm, well not really" "Can you bend your wrist?" "Ummm.... no". Crap.

Murray always rides with a bandanna on his head to keep from getting a helmet tan on his shaved head, so he took that off and made it into a sling to stop her from moving it and to elevate it, we called someone who wasn't too far away and had a bike rack, and got her to lie down while we waited. The girl with the grazes said her parents lived close by, so Murray rode with her back to her parents place, and Natalie wasn't looking too bad (apart from feeling a bit sore and a bit in shock), so Alice and another guy stayed with her until she got picked up, and the resy of us continued on our ride as there was nothing more we could do.

It's always scary when this happens, nobody really knows wat to do. It was the first time I've been on a ride when someone's crashed, and I felt useless and didn't really know what to do myself. Might go update my first aid certificate...

Not sure how Natalie is, but she works at Canberra Hospital which is where she got taken, so she'll be in good care. Hopefully it's just fractured, but arms aren't generally as lumpy as it was, so it may be broken unfortunately. Poor thing. I'll give her a call and see how she is.

Natalie and the girl next to her were both on mountain bikes (very common at the start of the novice program), and they touched handlebars and didn't have the experience to safely untangle themselves which is what caused them to crash. The guy behind them didn't stop in time, and so went straight over the girls, but everyone else managed to stop in time. Lucky we weren't going too fast.

In other news we also had Alice and Stacie's hen's party (Alice couldn't help but think of how unattractive grazes look in a wedding dress as they crashed in front of her and hoped for the best). We just spent the arvo at Stacie's drinking champers, playing with 9 month old Lucy, and generally just hanging out. After that we went to Shogun Teppanyaki restaurant for an entertaining dinner, and went for a few drinks with the hen's dressed in their colourful wedding veils, "Bride" t-shirts and other interesting paraphenalia (details to remain secret!!).

Typical triathletes, we were all home by 11:30pm (including both hen's), but it was certainly a fun evening!

Nobody was feeling terribly energetic this morning so when we all met for our 9am run around Mt Ainslie, we decided to make it an hour long hilly walk instead and it was really enjoyable!!! Much nicer than running.... :-)

After that it was brekky for Rich's birthday, and shopping for chrissie pressies and shopping for a dress and shoes forAlice's wedding next weekend.

This week I will be getting back into all my training sessions after my break. Since the Noosa tri in early November I've done nothing as we had a week of enjoying being on holiday in Noosa, two weeks of being sick and trying to recover for the Hartley Challenge, then one week of recovering from the Hartley challenge, so it's really been a month since I did much training!! Could be a tough week...