Apart from inadequate bike skills, there's a very good reason why we fall. If we didn't fall, then we'd never learn to pick ourselves up.

Samuel Butler, a 19th century novelist, famously said:

"Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world"

In other words, how can you learn anything if all of your mistakes are made in a sterile environment where pain is not possible?

Pretty much all my life, I have been picking myself up off the floor. Being bi-polar is all about being on the floor and being able to pick yourself up from it. Sometimes, it is really difficult to do. Sometimes, on the really hard days, it is tedious - what is the point of picking yourself up from the floor if you know you're going to be back there again within a week?

I had a bad fall in the desert. My worst fall to date. It happened in the real world - this was no simple pretend fall with a safety net. It was a real fall, on to real rocks, at a real 40 mph in the real desert. I have learned from it - the most important lesson being that falling is bad. The second most important lesson is that sometimes letting go of the throttle is the wrong thing to do.

I am licking wounds, getting over the fact that I won't be riding for a couple of months. Muhammed Ali put it better than I ever could when he said:

"I never thought of losing, but now that it's happened, the only thing is to do it right. That's my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life"

Ali was blessed with an unshakeable belief in himself. He was the self-proclaimed greatest long before he ever won a boxing title. I saw an interview with Ali after h was diagnosed with Parkinson's, where the interviewer was saying it was such a shame to see him in this state,

Ali stood up to his full height towered over the ibterviewer, and shouted:

"You DO NOT EVER feel sorry for me. I am Muhammad Ali - I am the greatest - DO NOT EVER feel sorry for me".

I aspire to the same level of self-belief. This is the same guy who once said:

"I'm so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark".

I am so tough, and so determined, that the river bed in Morocco is shitting itself for the day I go back there and nail it. I did not come this far to fail.

I was explaining to the Wee Yin today that there are 206 bones in the human body. I only broken one. That means that I have have 205 bones that are unbroken and OK - 99.5% of my bones are intact. Not a bad batting average.

It's all about perspective. I will be back.

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