How to… be injured
There are two sorts of injury. There is the type caused by a sudden involuntary departure from the design parameter of your bike. This is technically called ‘falling off’. And there is the overuse injury, which is technically called, ‘ignoring your sore knee until you can’t walk’.
In general, doctors cling to a theory that a good way to recover from a cycling injury of either variety is to stop cycling. (There is, in fact, some truth in the notion that when a GP has a patient who doesn’t do any exercise he or she tells them to start, and when faced with someone who already does lots of exercise, tells them to stop.)
Feel free to argue about your doctor’s suggested recovery times. You, after all, are a cyclist, so you can be confident of being able to recover better than anyone else in the whole history of medicine. Your competitive spirit means that you will just damn well heal faster or die trying.
Demand the best that the NHS has to offer. After all, what’s more important, curing virulent forms of cancer, or getting you back on your bike in time for the first races of the cyclo-cross season?
Check to see that your injury hasn’t miraculously healed by regularly trying to go cycling anyway. Just think how annoyed you’d be if you got better and didn’t notice because you were just sitting about ‘getting better’.
Finally, when you’re fully recovered, be sure to investigate fully the circumstances of the original injury by recreating them as exactly as possible.