(no subject)

[ornoth_cycling]

Last year I crashed out of my PMC ride when I was at the tail end of a paceline and hit a pothole that no one had signaled. Today I was in a paceline on a Quad Cycles ride approaching Carlisle when the guy in front of me lost it. He’d been daydreaming and touched wheels with the guy he was following, which is a recipe for instant death.

It’s like having the car in front of you lose all his tires when you’re travelling 80 miles an hour; there was nowhere I could go but over him. Cyclists call it an “endo”; not because you need an endoscopy afterward, but because you go “end over end”, or over the handlebars. The guy behind me also went down.

We all got up and inventoried our bodies (first) and our bikes (second). No one was seriously hurt, and I think I was the worst off. I had a patch of road rash on my right hip, slightly higher than where I hit in last year’s PMC crash; a good-sized road rash on my right knee that swelled up prodigiously; plus a few assorted other cuts and bruises. The worst is the knee, which will take a bit of time to heal, but it isn’t all that serious. That’s good, because I’ve been uninsured since earlier in the year.

Fortunately, the PMC ride is still a month away, and I should be fine by then. Of more concern is my west coast trip, which is in two weeks. Still, I imagine things will be fine by then, since after icing my knee and hip I managed to make the 22-mile ride back home. It’s more frustrating that I had been planning to spend over 160 miles in the saddle this fine weekend, and now I’m reduced to sitting at home and eating. But I’m thankful it wasn’t any worse, because it was a lot like those really messy first-lap pileups that you sometimes see in auto races.

Oh well. At least Le Tour will be on!