Crash

I come from a fairly active family, but because I am the oldest child and have been away from home the longest, my athletic obsessions have tended to diverve a bit from those of the rest of my family. In the last decade they have become skiers and cyclists, and I have become a runner. In the last few years especially the bicycles in our garage at home and books on cycling on our bookshelves have multiplied, and my brother and dad have begun riding longer and longer distances, and a couple summers ago my entire family put me to shame on a bike ride at the beach by the end of which I was about ready to collapse. I had a bike that I rode around Provo in the summertime—to campus, to the bookstore, to the grocery store—but as an avid runner I had a whole host of reasons for not converting to cycling and I didn’t spend nearly as much time on bicycle seat as everyone else.

But this past spring as the weather started getting warmer, I dragged my rusty, weather-worn bicycle over to the bike shop to have it spring-cleaned and repaired for the summer. Sadly, it seems I had left my bike outdoors one winter too many and the cost for a full repair would be worth almost more than the bike itself. So I called my dad, the official road bike supplier for the rest of the family, and thus I became the last person in my family to take up cycling.

I haven’t converted to cycling, necessarily. That whole host of reasons to stick with running still holds true. But it’s nice cross-training, and kind of fun to travel longer distances. One of the things I love about running is that exploring a place on foot makes it much more familiar than when you’re speeding by it in a car. A bike may be faster than my own two feet, but it’s still slower than a car, and on a bike I can greatly extend my radius. And I love feeling like I’m a cyclist, rather than just someone riding a bike. I have a road bike and biking shoes with toe clips and cycling gloves and yes, even spandex. When I compare myself to, say, my brother who races twice a week and considers fifty miles an easy ride, I may not feel like a cyclist. But when I’m out on the road I at least look the part.

And now I feel official, because this weekend I got my first battle scars.

One of that whole hosts of reasons for being a runner instead of a cyclist is that running is a lot less dangerous. Everyone in my family has crashed their bike at least once, and even professional cyclists go down occasionally. In my eight-year career as a runner, however, I have never once gone flying headfirst onto the pavement. That’s something that just doesn’t happen to runners. Injuries happen, but they usually happen slowly, over the course of days or weeks, and they all take place below the skin, whereas cyclists are subject both to slow injuries and to injuries that are sudden, painful, and bloody.

My own, very first sudden, painful, bloody cycling injury occurred this Saturday, and to be honest it was kind of a stupid accident. Actually, I wasn’t even supposed to be riding my bike that morning in the first place. There was a ward camp-out this weekend, and the night before I had packed my things and left Ann Arbor with a couple friends in pouring rain, already feeling discouraged at the thought of setting up a tent in the mud and huddling under tarps. A few miles out, the driver realized she had left her directions at home, but she thought she remembered how to get to the campsite, and if we got lost or disoriented we could just call someone on the activities committee, and if things got really bad we could just call her sister, who could find the email with directions or Mapquest the route for us. Two and a half hours later (a good hour of which was spend driving back and forth along the same five mile stretch of road) every one of these recourses had failed us, and tired, hungry, and discouraged we finally just drove back to Ann Arbor and went out to dinner. During dinner we learned what had gone wrong, and armed with that knowledge my two friends decided to try again. But by then it was after nine, and I had lost all enthusiasm for camping. Another hour or more on the road, setting up the tent in the mud in the dark, having to be social when all my social energy was dead, sleeping for a few hours on the ground—I just couldn’t do it, and so I went home. The next morning, however, I was beginning to feel the anti-social guilt creep in and I decided that if I wasn’t going to be hiking and canoeing with the ward this morning, I might as well get out and do something, and so I hopped on my bike.

I was a bit sluggish at first, but once I had been moving for a little while I started to have fun exploring some roads I hadn’t explored yet, and it turned into an awfully good ride. I was feeling good, I was going fast, I was getting some sun on my arms, and I was seeing places I had only ever seen from inside my car. After doing a nice wide loop, I was feeling ready to come back home, so I got into a left turn lane that would turn me around, and I unclipped my shoes to wait for the light to change. The light turned green and I kicked off and made the turn, but I was having a little trouble clipping my right foot in. This has happened before and it’s never been a problem. I glanced down, as I had always done, just long enough to get my toe in the clip, then looked back up again and realized that somehow I had horribly misjudged my turn radius and was headed straight for the curb. I had just enough time to realize that I was going to crash and that it was going to look very silly to the people in the handful of cars at the intersection who would have seen me make a left turn and then ride my bike straight at the curb for no apparent reason.

There was no time to turn my bike. There was no time to twist my shoes out of the clips. My wheel hit the curb and my entire right side connected with the sidewalk, and my very first thought was how very grateful I was for my helmet as I heard (and felt) it crack against the concrete. Then there was pain, in my shoulder, my arm, my hip, my knee. Someone in a car a few feet away called out, “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” I replied as best I could. Then the light turned and she sped away and I wondered all day why someone would say anything at all if they had no intention of at least waiting long enough to see that I was okay. Which I was, fortunately, but it took me a couple minutes to be certain that nothing was wrong other than a few scrapes and, possibly, bruises (today I can confirm the bruises). I lay for a moment on the sidewalk, then sat for a moment on the curb, then dragged myself to my feet and limped my bike over to the 7-11 across the street. They let me use their restroom and I washed the blood and gravel off from the entire right side of my body. The gear shifter on my bike was bent inward (a repair that took two minutes at the bike shop and cost me nothing), but other than that the bike seemed okay. My enthusiasm much subdued, I rode seven miles back to my apartment, seven miles that would have been a lot nicer had I been able to think about anything other than getting home and showering and slathering my shoulder and elbow and hip and knee with Neosporin.

But now I feel like I have been through a rite of passage of sorts. All my rides thus far have been nice, but uneventful, and it sort of seemed like I couldn’t really call myself a cyclist until I crashed or blew a tire or bonked twenty miles from home or got caught in a downpour. Far from being discouraging, the crash itself makes me want to get on my bike again. Until now I have been mooching off of my family’s experience—the nice bike and the toe clips and the gloves and the spandex shorts all feel a little fraudulent because I didn’t have to go through the all the intermediate phases to get there. My gear tells the other cyclists on the road that I’ve been riding for a lot longer than the two months that I actually. But now that I’ve acquired a few road burns and a story, I feel more justified. There will be more crashes and tires blowing and all the fun stuff that makes me want to stick with running, and I wouldn’t say I’m looking forward to it (next Saturday I plan to go on a nice, long, safe run), but I know I can survive and I can now number myself with all the other real cyclists who have also survived.