Officially back in the peloton

I’m excited to say I’ve erased the little bit of doubt left in my mind about my comeback to the highest level of cycling with my completion of the Tour Down Under. Just a few short months ago, a few hard days of training would plunge me into a week of depression and fatigue. But I felt better and drastically improved each day of the race.

The final part of my recovery I had to address this week was my thinking processes during a race. The most difficult thing about my traumatic brain injury is that it really jumbled my psychology around. The little things that once were so natural or automatic–like processing and reacting to a situation– became slower or more difficult. I had to become aware of these thought processes in my every day life and make changes. I also did a lot of cranio sacral therapy to stimulate the central nervous system into processing at full speed again.

It took a while for my efficiency at speed to come back while racing, but I progressed steadily over the week. I was aware of the moments where normally I would have had an automatic reaction but now hesitated or reacted differently. It felt like a refresher course. I was relearning all the little ways I use to analyze and execute race situations. But it’s all coming back, and quickly. Just like in my early cognitive rehab, I just have to sort of go through the motions and relearn it all. Hope that all makes sense. Brain injuries are a complex subject!

I think after some good recovery time here, I will be a couple notches better at my next race, the Tour de Langkawi. In the meantime, I am in Sydney with Christian and CJ. We celebrated the Australian 4th of July (Australia day) by sitting on a plane and going to bed early. This week we’ll get some down time and a little training and be ready to go again soon!

Timmy

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 3:20 am and is filed under Features, Garmin Web Site, Home Page and tagged with Timmy Duggan, Tour Down Under. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.