oah, I feel sorry to hear that... I'm also a mountainbiker myselve (and a pritty good one, if I may say that...), I did never have really bad injures (of corse a few normal ones, but not like this) but I know how it feels when a tree (it looks like a tree...) is coming to you a little faster as you thought, and I also had a little problem with a van once, it came to me at 60km/h, and I came to the van at 60km/h aswell, that was about centimeters... but, one thing I like to know, did you actually fall becuase you did go too slow, since all times I fall of my bike, and had some wounds or such, was that becuase I was too slow... and not becuase I was going somewere at a too high speed... (that also is quite hard in the Netherlands though, I mean, it isn't flat, but nothing above the 10 meters up or down... it's quite tough to go fast here...)
It was fast, about 55km/h and I was in the air and by mistake squeezed the breaks. We all know what happened then.......
I know what you mean about mistakenly putting the brakes on, it's sort of just a human reaction. I haven't experienced it like you have with the mountain biking but I have while playing games. Obviously that doesn't cause injury to me, but it applies to real life - in a game like DiRT Rally where you race cars on jumpy gravel stages at high speed for example, you may be mid-jump and notice a corner coming up faster than you expected, or you may not have positioned yourself correctly for the jump, so instinct is to stab the brakes. That just causes lock-up of the wheels when you land, so you need to take them off and apply them again if you still need to brake, but try not to go straight in and stab it mid-air unless you 100% have to! Applying that to real life, if you do that in a car on a real rally stage, you can still lock up, just like you did while mountain biking. It's a very easy mistake to make, and is all based on our natural reactions, so it can become a bit of a habit and then it becomes harder to break away from that!
