TDU under the belt

I’m excited to say I’ve erased the little bit of doubt left in my mind about coming back to the highest level of cycling with my completion of the tour down under this last week. When training again the end of last summer, just a few hard days would plunge me into a week of depression and fatigue. I was a little worried that my excellent recovery abilities may be hampered but I felt better and drastically improved each day of the race. Also during the offsesson I did a lot of cranio sacral therapy to stimulate the central nervous system into processing at full speed again. It took a while for the efficiency at speed to come back this winter but it was progressing steadily over the week.
The final part of my recovery I had to address this week was my thinking processes in the bike race. The most difficult thing about my traumatic brain injury is was that it really jumbled my psychology around, the little things that were formally so natural or automatic ways of processing, planning, and reacting to a situation became slower or more difficult. I had to again become aware of these thought processes just in my every day life and make changes. Being back in a bike race was no different, albeit a little more difficult! I was aware of the moments where normally I would have an automatic reaction where I would hesitate or react and think differently. It felt like a refresher course and I was really re learning all the little ways I use to analyze and execute a situation in a race. But its all coming back quick, just like in my early cognitive rehab, I just have to sort of go through the motions and relearn it all. Hope that all makes sense, brain injuries and psycholgy is a complex subject! I think after some good recovery time i will be a couple notches better at my next race, the tour de langkawi.
In the meantime I am in Sydney now with Christian and CJ before heading off to langkawi. We celebrated Australian 4th of July (Australia day) by sitting on a plane and going to bed early. This week we’ll get some down time and a little training block and be ready to go again soon!

Timmy