Road Rash and Road Kill

Okay, you might be thinking this is the entry where Joe writes about sports injuries and compares them to the poor dumb animals he finds on the side of the road, but you'd only be half right.  Yes, I'm gonna write about all my favorite spills, but on today's ride, I was the road kill.  No, I was not hit by a car, but I was run over by another bike.  I will explain all in a few short paragraphs.

First, let's talk about road rash.  Road rash is the term used to describe the scrapes received from falling down and sliding on the road.  The faster one is going before the spill, the deeper the road rash because one spends more time sliding before stopping.  Motorcyclists get the worst road rash, which is why they are supposed to wear all those leather clothes.  There is another term called road burn where one is scraped through the clothes, or lightly abraded by the road surface where there is no bleeding involved.

I've got some great road rash scars, mainly on my lower legs, around my knees, one on my hip, one on my butt, a few around my elbows, some deep ones on the back of my hand, and one on my shoulder blade.  First of all, here's what fresh road rash looks like (WARNING: If you don't like the sight of blood, do not look at the following picture):

You should see the other guy!

I've gotten road rash exactly like this one before getting stuck in a rut in Griffith Park and having the front wheel get jammed with nothing to do but fall over.  This happened to me today in Chino Hills next to some road construction.  Unfortunately, there weren't any signs warning us about an open trench, and what looked like some loose dirt and gravel on the side of the road was really a six inch deep dropoff that I slipped into and fell out of.

Falling off a bike is pretty easy, if you think about it.  All you have to do is push the bike away from you and fall on the pavement.  Never hit the pavement with a bike still in between your legs because that is a very good way of getting extra bruising and may be broken bones.  Yeah, falling is the easy part, but the landing and the abrupt stopping is the hard part.

So, I did that and landed on my chest and took the brunt of the fall on my hands and my left knee.  You saw (if you weren't squeamish) how my knee took the abrupt stop and the palms of my hands feel a little bruised, but not so bad.  What was the bad part is that I became road kill after my fall.

One of my riding buddies, Jayne, was following right behind me when I fell.  She saw the bike go one way and veered left to get away from it.  Well, remember, I also went left to get away from my bike, so Jayne had nowhere to go except use me as a speed bump.  I felt her front tire go over the small of my back, and then I felt her and her bike land on top of me.  Jayne was okay, since I was there to break her fall, but I felt some extra pain in my pelvic region and I was eager to make sure that I was still of the male gender.  Yup, still a guy.

So, after a few minutes to shake the cobwebs out, wash the rash (I was riding with women, so I was inundated with handiwipes, antibiotic cream, and bandaids), offered Adrian's magic crash cookie (which I took later, but not at the time of the crash), we were back on our way climbing the, ahem, "rollers" of Chino Hills.  Let's just call it a rolling climb like Mulholland Drive, and we'll leave it at that.

You may ask, is that the worst crash you've ever had?  Simple answer, no, but it would be hard to say which was my worst crash.  My most spectacular crash was when I touched wheels in a pace line on the San Gabriel River Trail and fell halfway down the river embankment.  That crash involved a human chain to get my bike back to the top of the trail and plenty of blood on my handlebars from scraped flap of skin on my finger.  The most damaging crash was tumbling down East Fork Road when my back wheel locked going around a blind curve on a steep descent.  That involved a helmet cracked in two places, ripped up gloves, a hole in my shorts (that's where my rash scar on my butt came from), and a separated shoulder.  I was still able to ride the 30 miles home, but I was very worried that I had broken my collar bone.

But my most expensive crash came when I got this scar:

"Cut me, Doc. I can take it."

That's a surgical scar from repairing my third metacarpal which had broken in two places.  I got my two middle fingers stuck in the wheel spokes of a nearby bike after I fell off my bike, and that little maneuver snapped the metacarpal like a chicken bone.  I'm now bionic since I have five little surgical steel phillips head screws in the palm of my hand.  I was in a cast for five weeks, in rehab for two months, and off the bike for four months.  I could not exercise at all because any exertion would have increased the blood pressure in the extremities, and any swelling near my hand while the bone was knitting would have been, in my surgeon's language, "bad."  I'll relate the details of the crash at a later time, or, if you can't wait, bug one of my friends since two of them were there and the rest have already heard the story.

So, until I can come up with a better nickname, just call me Jayne's Speed Bump.