Crash course

Last Friday morning I crashed my bike on my way to work. I took a route that passes by an apartment complex that Laura and I may move to, thus allowing me to test the new, potential commute. Shortly after having passed by the complex, I easy-pedaled along a winding bike path that runs along the edge of a golf course that had been heavily irrigated that morning. Several puddles had accumulated on the smooth concrete of the path, and after riding through a puddle and getting my tires wet, I leaned into a tight turn in the damp morning shade of a tree and both tires slid out from under my bike. My vision went horizontal and my mouth shouted out an expletive. A fraction of a second later I smacked into the concrete and slid to a stop a few feet away.

The unusual thing about this crash that makes it worth blogging about is that it hurt a lot. After coming to a stop on the pavement, I untangled my legs from the bike and quickly went through my mental post-crash checklist. Is anything in me broken? Are my clothes torn? Is anything on my bike broken? It turned out the only thing that broke was one of the water cages, which snapped after I tried to bend it back into its correct shape. And of course I had the usual scrapes, on my hip and knee, as well as a few unusual scrapes, on my ankle and foot. But nothing in me was broken.

However, my hip ached a lot, and after getting back on the bike and continuing my way to work, I struggled to muster much speed. Partly this was because of the pain and rapid swelling in my hip, but partly it was because I was suddenly spooked by the act of balancing on two wheels, and I involuntarily handled my bike gingerly, even on the dry, debris-free turns. Finally I made it to work and began sticking lots of band-aids on myself. It would take more than forty-eight hours before I would walk without a limp.

Lots of people are afraid of bicycling. What causes that fear? My wife fears the two-wheel balancing act—though to her credit she bikes to her running club most weeks nevertheless—and yet she rarely has any mishaps. Whereas I can think back on a long, hazy history of countless bike crashes, going back to my first year of riding. And always I ended up soon again on the bike, as though I'm unable to connect the painful consequences with the deed. It's a stupidity that I call resiliency, and it's something I'm very proud of, probably much in the same way many lifelong criminals are proud of their resistance to social conditioning.

For the next few weeks I'll have to take care not to fall on my left side. There's still a lot of soreness, and my hip remains swollen enough to have a bit of a feminine look to it. But I've already emotionally forgotten about the crash, and I'm back to leaning into turns and generally biking too aggressively. Seconds, sometimes whole minutes, are at stake.