Impact!

An exciting start to the morning yesterday. I was biking home from the gym, crossing Main Street in Longmont, when a guy in a little white Mustang rolled through the stop sign going the opposite way and proceeded to try and make a left turn through my bike (with me on it).

Fortunately he saw me at the last second and hit his brakes, so was probably only doing 5-10 mph when hit bumper hit my front wheel, and I realized that there was no way of avoiding the collision and leaned into him so as to go onto the hood, rather then be thrown into the street (one of those tricks they teach you in bike safety - the 1 ft fall onto either the hood or the windshield, both of which have some give to them, will hurt a lot less than being tossed onto concrete, which is both further away and much harder.)

So I fell onto his hood, away from the bike, rolled over the corner and thence onto the street, landing on my back. No head hit, as I had tucked it forward.

A full 911 compliment was called by a trucker who saw the whole thing happen, so I had the sad privelege of declining a free ride to the hospital by the two cutest EMT's I have ever met, the fire engine assured that my bicycle was not about to burst into flames, then left, and two of Longmont's finest spent 40ish minutes determining that he had, in fact, broken the law by failing to yield the right of way, and was at fault for the accident.

I got me and my bike home, took a quick shower (the combo of gym sweat and adrenaline could not have been very nice), and headed to the Urgent Care clinic. The good news is that I received a fairly clear bill of health. The better news is that the PA I saw wrote me a scrip for a massage, which I promptly received last night. The best news is that the massage was fairly successful in helping hold off the whiplash that felt pretty imminent by yesterday evening; I am not going to run any races today, or be back on any bikes for a little while, but it doesn't look like Hawaii next week will be too badly affected.





















The only really bad news is that Mr. Bicycle is somewhat the worse for wear from all this:

Most of you probably know that a bike wheel is supposed to be kind of flat; the lack of flatness in the wheel is rather apparent. Small bends can be pretty easily fixed through a process called truing, but at some point your rim is proper fucked, and I'm pretty confident we're well beyond that point here.

In the second pic, see those two black metal bits in the top-right corner? They're called the fork, and they're what hold the front wheel to the bike. They're supposed to be parallel, and are rather, erm, not.

The rest of the bike has a lot of scratches and dents from its rather rude introduction to the concrete on main street.

All things considered, however, as car vs. bike accidents go this one was quite minor. A replacement bike probably won't cost the insurance company more than $1000, which is less than the cost of any single X-ray, MRI, or whatever that the clinic would have done had I been complaining of any serious internal pain after landing on my back.

I'm a little grumpy about the bike; I loved that damn bike, and they really don't make butt-welded steel frames like that anymore. But such is life, and I find myself feeling pretty damn lucky this morning.