Crashing sucks!!!

Getting injured while crashing sucks even more.

As you might have guessed, today didn't go so well for me. It was a brief day for me. I missed my first session this morning while I removed the seat and tank to get to the plug to re-connect the fuel pump to it's power source. A simple oversight on my part that could have been avoided if I'd simply started the bike at any time in the 24 hours before my practice session started.

So, I made it out in the second session and spent the first few laps scrubbing in and warming up my tires. Alan Schmidt came by me and I figured I'd use him as a carrot since one of my goals this weekend was to get my lap times down a considerable margin. Alan was on his 1000 when he came by me on the brakes going into T7. My brakes were a bit soft this morning and I knew I would have to bleed them when I got back in but I decided to stick w/ Alan the best I could anyway. So I followed him thru 8 and 9 and of course he yarded me down the front straight to the tune of about 12-15 bike lengths and I got on the brakes a bit late and kind of scared myself a bit going into 1 because the bike just wouldn't slow down, but I tipped it in and trail braked it in pretty heavily, I carried a lot of the speed thru 1 and 2 and gained about 8 bike lengths on Alan by the time I came into T3. I tipped into T3 like I normally do and was again making up a bit of ground on Alan when the front end simply let loose. There wasn't a lot of warning when it went away and I had no time to react and I was sliding before I really new it.

When I hit the ground I must have snagged my right foot on the pavement in a bad way because I could instantly feel pain in my foot. When I stopped in the grass I tried standing up and my ankle was in a lot of pain. The turn workers were right there and Alex helped me hop off to the wall. I couldn't put any pressure on my foot w/ out a lot of pain so I caught a ride w/ the ASIT guys to the ambulance where the EMT's kind of looked at it and said get it X-rayed. So I caught a ride to my pit and iced my foot while I waited for Melissa to show up and give me a ride to the emergency room.

After a relatively short time at the ER the X-rays (thankfully!) revealed nothing was broken and I got the obligatory pain meds prescription and headed back to the track.

This is when I got my first look at the bike. The bike came out of the ordeal w/ only a few light scratches/scuffs on bodywork and a bent shift lever. Pretty amazing really! I'd like to thank Phillip Trujillo and his wife? gf? and Jason Bluth for helping me load everything up! I couldn't have done it w/ out your help guys.

As of this writing, some 15 hours later, I still can't put any pressure on the ankle w/ out serious pain so it looks like I won't be coming back to race for sunday. I'm pretty disappointed that I had to wait 14 weeks with no racing only to turn 3 laps and crash out and finish my weekend... at least I don't have a broken bike to fix up tho...