□ Placeholder: 20 — A 100km Ride and a Broken Limb

Couple of weeks ago, I did a 100km ride on my e-bike and fractured my hand (it's all better now… almost?). It all sounds dramatic and to some extent it is — but let's begin with the 100km ride.

The number 100 — it is an arbitrary number but since I rode 80km the last reported ride, the next ride had to be more than that. 100km seemed like challenging enough to be validated but more importantly it was the distance to the northernmost town of mainlands Netherlands called Den Helder. Conveniently enough, it would also be the remaining route of the official LF Kustroute - aka Dutch Coastal Route, that begins in Cadzand-Bad, near Belgium border and ends in Bad Nieuweschan, near German border.

If you remember, we had done the bottom halve of the same route in our previous ride and we wanted to see what rest of the route looked like in up north and spoiler alert: it didn't disappoint.

On our route, we passed multiple beach towns that did not look like the typical flat lands at all. What they did remind us of was the start of Black Forest in Germany or towns in Ardennes, Belgium.

When we were not in the beach towns, we were in the Dune Reserve with sand that was as white as the afternoon sun.

Soon the white dunes were covered in grass that looked like valleys. If I were to drop you right in the middle of this without the context of where you are and where you came from you probably wouldn’t be able to tell if this was flat Netherlands.

While I was floating away on a slightly uncomfortable saddle, marvelling at the magnificence of all the nature all around, it hit me just how privileged cyclists are in this country (duh!). There's no way we would have discovered these places on cars or even public transportation. There's no way we would have thought of coming to these places after knowing about these places. There's no way we would have experienced this place the way we experienced this place if we weren't on bikes.

And so, paddle after paddle we floated on the designated path. Every once in a while we would stop to take pictures and get back in the rhythm again. The difference between photographing while walking and cycling is the amount of friction involved to step off from the rhythm of the activity, taking the photograph and get back in the activity’s rhythm. While walking, the friction is extremely low because the activity isn’t paced. You process the landscape, you get out the camera, snap and on your way. But while cycling, I found the friction to be high — high enough to miss some photographs that could have been good photographs. Every time bringing the bike to a halt is a conscious decision. It might be an interesting experiment to see how the photographs differ when you take them while walking and while biking.

While I'm thinking these thoughts, around 87km mark in the ride, I remember hitting the brakes and then tripping over on the empty asphalt bike path about a meter ahead. Almost flying over. The bike stopped right where I hit the brakes and all of this happened in the smallest fraction of second.

It took me a second to realise I wasn’t on the bike anymore so I pulled myself together (I was conscious and no head injury so that's good!), checked my limb and found that I can't move my left hand very well. I just had a fall, what do I expect from myself — I tell this to myself and pick my bike to examine it. No deal breakers in the bike apart from minor scratches here and there.

I take a few minutes to orient myself again and try to hold the bike but now the pain in my left arm is unbearable to a point where I can’t straighten it. A thought crosses my mind — did I break it? But no, if I had broken it I would have been in a lotttt of pain. Now looking back, I think I was in a lot of pain but in the moment it felt like the limit of the pain would be higher if I had really broken it.

I lowered the seat post height so that I depend less on my arms and cycled the remaining 14kms or so. At Den Helder, we got the dinner and took the train back and made to Amsterdam the same night. I cycled again about 4kms from the station back to my place and the pain had doubled. I wrapped a crepe bandage around my hand and went to sleep only to be awaken a few times throughout the night.

The next morning I decided to call the hospital and ask for an appointment. After hearing my story, they thought I should wait till Monday to get my X-rays done. When the results came out, it was indeed a teeny tiny fracture on the lower part of my elbow. Thankfully, the minor fracture didn't warrant a cast. Two weeks later, it's still recovering and hopefully will be better in couple of more weeks.

So that's the story of a 100km ride and a broken limb.

Stay safe and until next time,

Kamal

PS: Photos were taken on iPhone 12 Pro (ProRAW) and developed on the horrendous Photos app on Mac. It was painfully slow to make adjustments even on a “M1 MacBook Air.”