I was on my way to the local bike shop Dale's with my friend Margaret on a beautiful Friday afternoon to go get the fork on my bike cut. For those of you unfamiliar with bikes, there's the main part of the bike frame and there's this piece called the fork which holds your front tire and slides up through a hole in the main part of the frame. I just bought a new bike and so there's this extra 6 inches of metal tubing sticking up out of my bike that still needs to be adjusted to how high I want my handlebars to sit.
So I'm on this short 3 mile bike ride to Dale's behind Margaret and we're maybe a mile out behind this car that is not very clear about what it's doing. For various reasons I had to stop suddenly. The real problem here is that on the bike I had previously been riding all year I needed to pull both the front and rear brakes real hard to attempt to stop that quickly and so on instinct I pulled both the front and rear brakes on my new bike, which was a huge mistake, because the brakes are much nicer on this bike and so I effectively stopped my bike and sent myself flying over the handlebars. Based on my gears, my friend estimates I was going somewhere around 15-20 mph. Though I don't remember exactly how I hit the road, I'm pretty sure I hit on my right shoulder first, then sort of slid on to the rest of my right arm and hit my head. There are some strange bruises on my left leg that I have no idea where they came from.
5 days later and I have most of the movement back in my arm and it's healing well, but in all seriousness if I had simply fallen forward I could have put a serious hole in my chest with my still uncut fork. I've also had a friend's dad tell me he broke his wrist in a similar accident and a coworker tell me her niece broke both her arms that way too. The fact that I came home, had Margaret clean out my wounds (though very painfully) and that I'm doing fine is incredibly remarkable to me.
Needless to say I'm so glad everything went as it did.
I'm glad you are alright. :)
ReplyDelete