Spanner in the works...

First up I should apologise for how late this update is, I've been waiting until I could type with both hands to make it a little easier.

Up until the 22nd of November our winter training was going really well. We had a good plan sorted and had just enjoyed a quality away day. We broke our crew embargo on Tryweryn because we heard it was running on a mighty 16cumecs which is pretty much double the usual race level. At that level it is a lot of fun and not shallow at all. All of this came to a grinding halt on the 22nd when I broke my right collarbone in a cycling accident. It was quite a bad break and the consultant suggested the best option was to have an operation straight away and get it pinned back together. The GB Canoeing medical team and I all agreed that this was the best idea so two days later I had an operation to attach all the fragments of bone to a meccano style metal plate. The operation went well and the Surgeon did a really good job of clearing up the mess I had made of it.

Since then I've been drinking a very large amount of milk as part of a nutritional strategy to maximise my recovery. For the last two weeks I've also been able to train CV session on exercise bike and turbo trainer. It's going to be quite a long wait to be back to full training but hopefully if things go well we should be back up to speed by the time the season starts. It's frustrating to have missed out on the opportunity to work on specific areas we wanted to improve on but they'll still be on the shelf ready to roll next winter.

In the mean time Etienne has been studying the mystic art of C1 paddling. He's been toughing out some pretty cold mornings here in Nottingham particularly as he's much less stable than we are in C2 but I've heard things are going well overall.

Thanks very much to everyone who has been supporting me and in particular to Ben, Chris 'n' Helen for taking me to Hospital, my housemates Fraser, Kate and Kathryn (I haven't done any washing up since the accident), Katharine Ready our team physio and Darren Forward who bolted my collarbone back together.

Until the next update you can safely assume I'll be pedalling away on a static bicycle somewhere hopefully forging a strong new collarbone, Cheers Tim.

(Posted on the 3rd Dec 2009)