‘Not the face!’

That’s probably what I was thinking right before my head slammed into that tree in Victoria, BC in 2003, but I really don’t know.

The other day I watched ‘Like Water’, a documentary about UFC Champion Anderson Silva as he prepares to defend his title against Chael Sonnen  in 2010. During and after which, I was thinking about preparing for pain and how my attitude towards pain has changed. The next day, I was watching “Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds Live at Radio City” and that’s where I got the title of this post. Dave Matthews talks about that moment during a fall when you have enough time to realize you are going to get hurt, but not enough time to do anything about it, then they play So Damn Lucky. This got me wondering what I was thinking in that moment in August 2003.

I don’t really remember that day well, and I certainly don’t remember those few moments before I crashed. I’ve seen the tree, so I can see that I either made the turn too wide to start with, or I skidded. It’s a down a little grassy hill, and I can picture myself flying through the air, seeing the tree, ducking my head, and thereby smashing my helmet. I can pretty much guarantee that once I saw the tree, the words running through my head were colourful, simple, and to the point. Assuming I saw the tree, I would’ve recognized that it was going to hurt and that it would do some damage, but I couldn’t have known how much. If I knew, not guessed nor assumed, but knew how injurious it would be, would that effect what I thought, even though there was nothing I could do about it at that point? I’m not willing to re-create the scene to find out, but it is interesting to think about.