Journal of professional cyclists Ian MacGregor and Timmy Duggan

What Now?

After my high speed crash a few weeks ago at the Tour de Georgia I am happy to say that I am at home, healthy and well. A broken collarbone, scapula, and a moderate head injuy (basically a big bruise on my brain) isn’t fun but it could have been worse. I am very fortunate to have incredible support from my team, doctors, and my wife and family and friends.  Thank you to all who helped in my treatment and recovery!   Also, I really appreciate the outpouring of supportive messages, notes, cards, and phone calls.  Those really made me feel a lot better knowing I had so many people behind me.

I’m sure other athletes in a similar situation would agree, the time following a serious crash is a really strange time.  For one, I remember  nothing about the crash.  I crashed on a Wednesday, and my next coherent memory was on Friday afternoon when they wheeled me into my collarbone surgery.  I woke up in a hospital and they told me I had crashed in the race a few days earlier.  That was kinda crazy, but simple enough to deal with I suppose.  To have two days and a significant and traumatic event totally absent from memory was a new experience for me. Lucky for me when  I came around I was comfortable, pain free, and with my wife and parents at my side!  Also, the day after my crash, my team had won the team time trial and was now leading the entire race!  That certainly made me feel better!  I was truly lucky my head injury wasn’t worse.  Obviously my helmet did its job, so a big thank you to Giro for making a helmet that stands up to 50mph smacks to the pavement!   Another difficult part comes when the repercussions of what just happened start to sink in a little.  The first one to affect me was my change in goals, my vision for my cycling season.  I had been aiming all season for my grand tour debut at the Giro.  My biggest goals were to be a strong asset to Slipstream’s Giro d’Italia team, especially in the team time trial, as well as having a solid Tour de Georgia for preparation.  So it is been a little hard to deal with having the chance attain the goals I have been working toward for months taken away in a single day, right when everything was perfect and about to happen. So, what do you do now?  Being extremely goal oriented, I feel so strange if I go a month, a week,  even a day without a goal and a focus in mind. One very tough thing about injuries is the part you don’t know…how long will recovery take, what will I be like 2 weeks from now, 6 months from now? Or in the case of a head injury, will everything even be the same later on?  Will I be the same person, an athlete with elite capabilities?   Those are some tough questions.  Suddenly these are the things I was thinking about instead of how to win the TTT at the Giro.  So now I have to reassess, find new goals to work towards.  Number one, for me, is to recover and come back stronger than I was before.  Sometimes time taken off to recover from an injury is a blessing in disguise.  I broke my collarbone and ribs two years ago, took a lot of time on the couch, trained for two weeks, then had the best races of my season.  I was flying!  So that’s what I do now.  Learn as much as I can about my injury, do the rehabe, and recover to 100%.  I am spending this week at Craig Hospital in Denver doing testing to better diagnose my injury and find a prognosis.  I am approaching my recovery with the same intensity as my goals on the bike, and I am confident I will be back to racing stronger than I ever was before.

Thanks for your support!