This is not for the squeamish, a short story about a photographer’s foot. Grant Robinson is a bike rider and photographer, he took the Dirt 72 cover shot, here’s his story about his foot. If you’re like me and puke at the sight of an open wound then don’t look at the photo.

BLAME SAM!

The sun is shining and it is the perfect spring bike day but guess what I’ll be doing whilst everyone else is ridding? Sitting on the couch…damn. I’ve just undergone surgery on Wednesday to correct some serious problems with my foot.

For those medically minded, the foot surgeon’s report went a little something like this:

“The navicular itself has collapsed on the lateral side allowing the talar head to drift plantar-ward and laterally. I cannot restore the range of movement at the mid foot joints but he would have the best result by undergoing an arthrodesis of the most damaged joint, the talo-navicular plus the adjacent calcaneo-cuboid joint.”

To the rest of us this basically means the joints in the arch of my foot are now fused together giving me a bit of a club foot for the rest of my life. Yippee.

It all happened on a trail that I’ve ridden probably a hundred times before and know like the back of my hand. Unfortunately I made two mistakes before this particular run. The first one was saying in my head… “One more run and it’s home time”… always a no-no. And the second was thinking I had a bit of Sam Hill in me and deciding to try and drift through some berms. Admittedly I had ‘er pinned and it’s a track that I’ve probably found my maximum speed on and I may well have been above that speed but then pushing your limits is what riding is about isn’t it?

So it was a berm right and another berm left with a small jump on the exit. You need to come out of the last berm straight as there is a tree on either side of the jump with about 6 inches to spare. Well I came into the first berm a bit hot and with no drift whatsoever so into the second I gave myself a helping hand by tapping the brake slightly, getting the rear end out and “doing a Hill”, drifting nicely through the second berm. Unfortunately I couldn’t control my speed and carried on drifting up the lip of the jump and clipping my rear tire on one of trees. I tried to bail mid-air but I was off balance and it all went a bit wrong.
I did think whilst I was in the air that I would be lucky to get away with it…and then I hit the ground…and found my luck had run out. I landed on my foot really awkwardly and rolled my ankle to the outside. At first I thought maybe it was just badly sprained but when I tried to stand up there was obviously far more wrong.

In the end it was two torn ligaments and a complete collapse of the arch of my foot. Worst of all it has taken 7 months to get this surgery and it will probably be May or June before I’m back to good. Frustrating? For sure. I blame Sam…..but at least we all get to see the inside of my foot.

The inside of Mr Robinsons foot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwL7r29mUPI

Kasabian, Club foot, probably not Grants favourite tune at the moment.

GRANT ROBINSON’S FOOT