mtbandskiforlife

@valleybreezer: All good! I ordered a new Park torque wrench this morning :)

@barp: I honestly hadn't considered that yet. I'm a mechanical engineer and that makes a lot of sense. I have a decent torque wrench, but it's possible it's out of calibration like you suggested. I have several beam style ones lying around and this makes me want to do some testing. Thanks for the suggestion!

@suspended-flesh: thanks for sharing your experience and suggestion to take a break. I took about a ten year break from racing after college and just got back into it about 5 years ago. It's tough to consider taking a break again when I just started doing well again and was planning on trying some races at the pro level this year. This was by far the most serious crash I've had and the only one that wasn't caused by a riding mistake. It may not be worth the injuries to pursue that level of riding at almost 40 I suppose. I have also been considering getting back into some xc racing. Since I've gotten back into racing I've enjoyed it far more than I did when I was younger. I like training and having something fun to work toward that's not my job. While riding dh and enduro are the types of riding I enjoy the most, maybe I don't need to race them or as much as I have been. Having a separated shoulder and broken pelvis in one year definitely makes me pause to reevaluate things. Last year I had no injuries and top ten finishes for 7/8 races I did though, so I'm quite torn on whether I just had some bad luck this year or if I should really change what I'm doing.

@valleybreezer: thank you! I'm actually a dad and she seems to already share some propensity to jump off stuff. We'll see if/when that translates to riding and I look forward to helping her learn from some of my mistakes.

This is sad news and really hits home on what could've happened for myself in a recent accident. Two weeks ago I had my bars slip in my stem, despite having used carbon paste and a torque wrench during installation, before a jump while practicing for a race. The crash resulted in a fractured pelvis, fluid in my abdomen from the impact, a liver laceration, concern about my spinal cord, and possibility of a bowel perforation that caused a night stay in the hospital. I got lucky that it happened where it did and not in the trees at higher speed. I'm very fortunate to be walking and starting to spin on the road bike already. It just goes to show that shit can happen even if you do everything right and what happened to Scott can easily happen to any of us. What we do is dangerous and the probability of something bad happening goes up the more we participate. That's one of the reasons I don't backcountry ski as much as I used to. I don't know how my recent accident and this news will change my racing and riding, but I will forever be paranoid about stuff being tight and it does cause me to think hard about some of this with having a 4 year old daughter.