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Lance Armstrong crashed on a trail, and his face took the worst of the fall

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Sometimes you’re the hammer and sometimes you’re the nail, is how Lance Armstrong put it.

In the case of Armstrong’s recent ride, though, sometimes you’re the bike and sometimes you’re the ground.

Armstrong face-planted Wednesday and posted an image of the damage inflicted by the Tom Blake Trail in Snowmass Village, Colorado, just outside Aspen. Armstrong reported that he “took quite the blow to the noggin” and was checked out at Aspen Valley Hospital. Older and wiser, Armstrong admitted that he didn’t just shrug this off.

“For the 46 years prior to today, I completely would have blown off getting checked,” he wrote. “Not now.”

Armstrong last spring agreed to pay $5 million to the federal government to settle a fraud lawsuit over whether he owed $100 million to taxpayers for doping while competing for a cycling team sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service. He also agreed to pay $1.65 million to cover the legal costs of Floyd Landis, a former teammate who was the whistleblower in the case. The Postal Service paid Armstrong’s team $32.3 million between 2000 and 2004 to ride under its express delivery logo.

The agreement ended the last legal action against Armstrong, who was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles in 2012 and barred for life from Olympic sports for doping.