The hyper-talented, hyperthin Andy Schleck may be a broken rider. We can only hope not.

By Christopher Cudworth with Monte Wehrkamp

It is a painful, difficult challenge coming back from a major injury. The higher the level of sport in which you participate, the more difficult the task of reaching your former level of performance.

One feels for the bike racer Andy Schleck, who this week abandoned from the Tirreno-Adriatico bike race in Italy. Last year Schleck crashed so badly he broke his sacrum, the triangle of flat, platy bone at the base of your spine. His comeback from that injury has not gone so well. A recent VeloNews story described it this way. “Andy Schleck (RadioShack-Leopard) abandoned Tirreno-Adriatico during a wet, cold stage 6 on Monday. After the stage, his team manager said that he hoped the 2010 Tour de France champion would seek psychological help in his return from the 2012 crash that kept him out of the Tour.”

Psychological help. We all need it sometimes. Coaches provide it. So do spouses, bosses, co-workers and ministers. If we’re lucky.

The average person walking down the street is a psychological mess by most measures. Anxiety. Anger. Napolean Syndrome. Napolean Dynamite. All mental problems. You name it. Baggage to be carried. It weighs the mind. Yet we keep going.

High speed chills

Cyclists streaking down a mountainside at 60 mph cannot afford to be a psychological mess like the rest of the world. Anxiety gets you dropped, and messing around with fear at that speed can get you killed.

But it can be enormously difficult to get your mojo back once it is gone. Just ask Austin Powers. He almost lost his will to Shag, Baby! And that’s not normal for Austin at all. Normally he’s the pillar of pride and confidence, even if he’s got teeth like the Pyrenees. If you smile wide enough, they say, you can conquer mountains. Smiles wipe away the fear, you see. Andy Schleck seems to smile a lot when he’s riding. But the smile does not seem to be working. He can’t get his mojo back.

Sacrum hell, it almost killed him

Today co-blogger Monte Wehrkamp sent me an email with some observations about the comeback of Andy Schleck.

Side note: We may not have covered it here in this blog, but during the first month of Monte’s own “comeback” to cycling when he bought his new Jamis road bike, he got veered into a curb by a mindless pickup driver cutting across a gravely parking lot. The truck nearly hit Monte, who was forced to T-bone the curb, which flipped him onto his back, and he tells me it hurt. Really hurt. He didn’t know it at that precise moment, but he had literally broken his back. His sacrum, to be precise.

Yet being the pain-denying mutha I know Monte to be, he rode his bike 11 miles back home. Worried that the pain was getting worse, he wisely stopped at the home of a fellow cyclist who happens to be one of the head emergency room doctors at Cadence Health Center, one of the premier hospitals in the Midwest. (That same doctor late last year took care of my busted clavicle from a bike crash. Me and Monte, we likes to crash it seems.)

The good doctor was not home, but his wife was there. She calmly suggested Monte get off his bike. His back hurt so bad he could not obey her suggestion. So she slowly jimmied it out from under him while he tried to raise one leg like an old dog, but all it did was produce even more pain. They called our doctor friend who checked him out and gave the prognosis: Busted sacrum.

I got the text that night:

“****! Broke my back. I’m such an idiot!”

Monte Wehrkamp during our annual ride to Lake Geneva. His back recovered from a sacrum break well enough to ride all summer.

That’s how Monte and I text each other all the time. Short, sharp shocks of reality. Usually with some cursing involved.

But Monte also has a tradition of writing me lucid, insightful emails about life and God and cycling as well.  Our exchanges are what got this blog started. We decided to talk to the world in the same language we talk to each other. Maybe someone would laugh along with us? We have fun anyway.

So this email from Monte about Andy Schleck arrived today, questioning whether Andy will ever again be a consistently world class rider after breaking his sacrum in an awful crash last year. As we now know, Monte knows how much that hurts. He’s been there.

Monte wrote:

“He may not make it back. Just not make it.

His team is even thinking he’s PTSD’ing. He’s through the physical recovery, now the trick is convincing himself that he can do it again like he used to. But he’s afraid. Like Derrick Rose. Afraid it’s not gonna hold. That it’s going to happen again. That it’s not ready, too soon.

I get it. You do, too. (Note: I broke my clavicle in a high speed crash last September.) 

Going down hard, harder than ever. Hearing the impact at first, before the physical realization of the severity of the impact. Before the shock wears away and you’re left with nothing but trembling pain. The understanding of how bad it was, and how close it was to the end. DOA. Or paralyzed. Hi, honey…I think I just pooped. 

Andy kept riding after he broke his back, as sacrum fractures are tricky to diagnose. He finished that time trial. He tried to ride again the next morning, but abandoned to the hospital for more tests. And that was that. The end of his year. And maybe, the end of his career. 

His body and his emotions haven’t forgotten. And physically, his back hasn’t either. It’s not gonna fit the bike like it used to. A bit of flexibility is going to be gone. Those nerves — all bundled in that transition zone at the base of the spine — were traumatized. They’re gonna be fiddly forever, too.

Riding with PTSD is real. Still have it myself. Riding with a sense of mortality. Riding with a target on my back (like FL, that sense of forboding, only to have an old woman barely miss cleaning me off the road an hour later). Does a rider ever fully open up again? Simple and unrestrained joy in riding? Or, like a jilted lover, always hold back a bit? 

I know lots of pros take terrible, smashing crashes and bounce back the next season. Or even on the next ride, if they didn’t break anything. Some guys break shit and just keep going. Hamilton rode the Tour, in yellow, with a broken clavical for goodness sake. Fiorenzo Magni tied an inner tube to his bars, then bit down on the other end so he could pull up on the bars while climbing in the Giro. Either riders like this are insane, or unimaginably mentally and phsycially tough. Hamilton said the pain was actually intoxicating — his body was probably releasing a cascade of hormones and chemicals just so he could endure.”

Probably the latter is true. Pro riders are unimaginably mentally and physically tough. But the former is just as true. Pro riders are clinically insane. Just ask them. They’ll tell you that keeping up with the peloton alone is an insane project some days, much less lashing down a mountain on a wet road and a lonely road.

Perhaps Andy Schleck is a little too nice a guy (he hugged his rival Alberto Contador after getting second in the Tour) and a little too sane for the insanity of riding with a formerly busted back. If so, who are we to blame him? Sanity is a rare commodity, even among those walking down the street.

It’s a confusing question. Whether we should, in the end, be nice people or be possessed by such a fierce desire to succeed that we sacrifice all sorts of common sense to prove that we can achieve. To prove it to ourselves, if no one else.

I know I’ve gone over the line more than a few times. Running to collapse. Coming back from what I thought was a case of heat stroke only to realize that years later that it was food poisoning, not heat stroke that had laid me low during a national meet. But the ghosts of that effort did haunt me. And I chased them away with miles of feverish training. It took years to get over the hump, and only when I ran in the top 5 of a major local road race in hot conditions did I realize I’d been fooling myself all along. I could run in the heat. But psychologically it seemed impossible after the original trauma.

Well, like Don Quixote we sometimes tilt at windmills. Just try not to fall of your bike while you’re doing it, or you’ll break your ass. So to speak.