Article September 15, 2003 Issue

A day of hiking & healing

By Pamela Guthman Kissock

A few months ago I went biking with some friends. It was the first time on my new bike—one designed especially for the Ironman competitions for which I had been training. They include biking, along with swimming and running.

The set-up was aggressive. It included bike shoes that clipped into pedals, which were quite difficult to release (similar to ski bindings). Fellow bikers had warned me that everyone falls many times before he or she gets the hang of it.

I realized in retrospect that what had happened was that my fellow bikers had led me up the path of self-fulfilling prophecy—and that I hadn't flexed my mental muscles enough to resist. I had unwittingly accepted the inevitability of falls, and, as you might guess, I did fall off the bike more than once. The falls were not soft, and after the last one on that trip, I was afraid that I could not or should not continue. One of my knees was extremely painful, and putting weight on it was almost impossible.