Last Sunday 3 May 2009, I decided to take part in a 65 km MTB tour in Sint-Lievens-Houtem : the Serge Baguet Classic. The participants could even stop halfway at Serge’s house to take in some food and drinks. I started alone, paid the 4 EUR to enter the tour, signed my name on an insurance paper and took off. Normally you get some 5-10 km of easier track to get used to the condition but here we got straight into a forest on a bit of a technical track. It was raining a bit but in the forest it was pretty dry. I managed to keep my head low when crossing a big overhead branch and generally was driving pretty slowly, also because it had been almost a month since I did any mountainbiking ansd it felt a bit akward coming from hundreds of kilometers on my race bike.
Only a few minutes into the forest it happened : I hit a branch that was lying on the ground. I did actually see it but I tought it was small enough to just drive over without having to ‘jump’ over. I was wrong. It felt like hitting a wall. I fell of my bike right down and hit my nose on the branch. Of course blod was immediately gushing out of my nose. I got up, took off my t-shirt and put it up to my nose in an attempt to stop the bleeding. I instantly felt that the situation was bad. A couple of friendly riders stopped to see if I was ok. After a few minutes the bleeding got a bit better. I took my stuff and rode on. Luckily I was out of the forest fast and back on a main road. I was able to drive back to my car that was parked about 100 meters from the starting point. I look in my rear view mirror and saw that my nose was twice as big with blood still coming out of it. I drove home in my car which took me about 25 minutes.
Then it was off to the hospital with my wife and kids. There some photos were taken and soon it was clear my nose was broken. It was still (pretty) straight so normally everything should heal without cirgury or so. The doctor cleaned it up, made two stitches and send me home. The swelling got worse the first day but started to go down from day 2 on. It’s now been 3,5 days since my accident and tomorrow I’m going back to work. Friday a specialist is going to look at everything once more and remove the stiches. I hope I don’t have to look like a boxer for too long.
All in all it could have been worse. Luckily the organisation of the Serge Baguet Classic was insured so I hope I can put this all behind me and get on my bike sooner than later and do more than the 5 kilometers I was able to do on my last nosebreaking trip …
