09.7.2005 | 11:18 am
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Even as I did my best to make my wrecks in yesterday’s post sound spectacular, I was acutely aware of one glaring fact: I’ve never wrecked really badly. I’ve never had to stay the night in a hospital because of a bike wreck. I’ve never had to wear a cast, or have a blood transfusion, or have more than a few stitches.
I may be jinxing myself by saying this, but I’ve gotten off easy.
My sister Kellene, on the other hand, has wrecked pretty darn bad.
Watch that first step.
Kellene lives near Fruita Colorado, which means she has easy access to a mountain biker’s paradise. High-desert riding, canyons, and (cue ominous music) cliffs.
A few years ago, Kellene and a friend went out riding on a popular mountain bike trail called Mary’s Loop. It’s not an especially technical trail, but there are lots of rock ledges, and there’s definitely some trailside exposure. And in at least one case, there’s a rock ledge with trailside exposure. Here, Kellene clicked out with one foot — leaving the other one in — and used her foot to boost her bike up onto the ledge.
And that’s when she lost her balance.
Tipping over toward the foot that was still clipped in, Kellene was unable to click out. It’s happened at one point to pretty much every mountain biker that’s ever bought clipless pedals.
For Kellene, though, this meant a fall off an overhanging cliff.
She dropped eighteen feet, straight down, and landed on a large, flat-topped boulder.
Damage report
If you’re the squeamish type, you may want to skip the rest of this post. My daily weight’s posted at the bottom, and tomorrow I promise I won’t be talking about wrecking bikes anymore.
OK, you’ve been warned.
Kellene broke her right wrist, and ripped opened up her knee so you could see everything. She smashed her jaw. She broke 14 teeth, and put her lower row of teeth through her lower lip, nearly severing it.
I swear, I still get sick just thinking about such a fall and the resulting carnage.
Amazingly — and let’s face it, cruelly — Kellene didn’t lose consciousness from this fall. In fact, Kellene’s day had just begun.
Help may — or may not — be on the way.
Luckily, Kellene’s friend had a mobile phone with her and made a 911 call. Consider, though: how do you tell an ambulance where you are when you’re on somewhere on a trail that’s known mostly by its nickname? And how do they find you? In this case, they didn’t — the ambulance searched, but never found Kellene.
The second call Kellene’s friend made was to her husband, Rocky, who works at a bank. And wears a suit. Rocky, unlike the ambulance, knew exactly where Kellene was and drove out. I’m tempted to say something like, “Rocky broke all kinds of speed limits getting to Kellene,” but the fact is Rocky breaks all kinds of speed limits when driving to church. So I’m guessing Rocky’s rate of speed in reaching Kellene cannot be expressed with conventional mathematics.
When he got there, Kellene had been at the bottom of this cliff for about an hour. Think about that for a second. Rocky took off his leather loafers and climbed down the cliff in his banker’s suit, then helped Kellene use her non-broken wrist and non-split leg to climb back up that cliff.
Recovery
They sewed Kellene up, gave her a cast, and wired her jaw shut. This, she says, is what nearly drove her over the edge. Sometimes you feel like you’re suffocating; sometimes you feel like you’re drowning. Once her jaw healed, she had endless trips to the dentist to reconstruct a set of teeth for her. Which, by the way, now look considerably better than most people’s real teeth. Having your dentist be a mountain biking buddy, a close friend of the family, and the most anal-retentive person in the whole world is a good combination, if you need a whole new mouth.
They wouldn’t finish finding and extracting broken pieces of Kellene’s teeth from Kellene’s lips for six months.
My sister could kick your butt.
Amazingly, Kellene seems just fine now. I can’t see any scars on her. She says her lower lip is pretty much permanently numb, but all things considered, things could’ve gone a lot worse.
So: does Kellene still ride? Yes, she does. In fact, she’s headed over to Vail, CO today to go mountain biking for a week with some friends.
And does Kellene ever ride Mary’s Loop? Yes she does.
And does Kellene ride the part where she fell off the cliff? No. Are you crazy?
Comments (5)
09.6.2005 | 10:42 pm
I’ve taken my share of falls. And I’ve taken your share, too. Here are a few of my favorites.
My First Ride
I managed to get a concussion the first time I ever rode a mountain bike, which put enough fear into me that I didn’t try again for several years. Really, I suppose I should thank Stuart for saving me from all the crashes I would surely have had during that time period, had I been on a bike.
Face Plant
The second time I tried the Leadville 100, I did something very stupid: I tried jumping my bike 85 miles into the ride. This is stupid for two reasons.
- It’s stupid because 85 miles into a race, I didn’t have the coordination or strength to do a jump properly.
- It’s stupid because I never have the strength or coordination to do a jump properly.
So I landed hard on my front wheel, bounced off the side of the road, and plowed a furrow with my face. The effect was horrific and I admit I loved the attention.
Dislocated Shoulder
A few years ago at the Leadville 100, I was very close to getting the sub-9-hours time I’ve wanted so badly for so long. I had lost time, though, due to a bad case of the barfs for about 45 minutes.
I was feeling better on the descent, though, and was pushing myself. I took a gravel patch with too much speed, washed out, and went down. I caught my full weight plus some momentum on my right arm, which dislocated with a nasty-sounding schkrukkk.
I sat up, yelping in pain, and then in fright at the fact that I could not move my arm at all. I was convinced my race was over.
Not having any idea of what I was doing, I used my left arm to lift my right arm, which settled back into place with a fwop. The sudden and complete transition from agony to relief was so intense I started giggling, and couldn’t stop. OK, maybe there was a little shock and a lot of adrenaline in there, too. In any case, I finished the race (9:20), and my shoulder swelled up impressively before the end of the day. It’s never been the same since.
Fall at Gold Bar Rim
I knew I shouldn’t try this. Everyone I was with knew I shouldn’t try this. And yet, I tried it. Basically, I was tired of being the guy who couldn’t do technical moves, so I took a shot at a double ledge drop on Gold Bar Rim, in Moab, Utah.
Everyone else I rode with made it, no problem. I approached too slow, hit with my weight too far forward, my front tire blew, and I flew forward over my bike, landing about six feet below on my face, wrists, ribs, palms and forearms.
For what it’s worth, I surprised everyone by finishing the six hour ride. (I may be clumsy, but I’m also remarkably stupid.)
Unexplainable Faceplant
This next wreck is hard for me to talk about, because I don’t have a legitimate reason for why it happened. I was just zipping along downhill — alone — on the trail I rode more often than any other trail. One second I’m consciously happy — actually thinking something like “I’m so happy riding my bike on a perfect trail on a perfect Autumn day” — and the next I’m sliding on packed dirt, gravel and embedded rock…on my face.
Later, I would explain to friends that scree washed into the trail from a recent rain was the cause of my fall. They didn’t believe it, and I don’t either. I just fell off my bike at 20mph. I’m stunned, I’m bleeding profusely, and I don’t know what I ought to do. OK, I should get home. What’s the fastest way home? I don’t remember. No, the best way home is to just keep going the way I was going anyway — finish the ride.
The bike was OK, so I got on and finished the ride, my face bleeding onto my top tube. The whole way home I never checked to see if I had all my teeth, because I was certain I had lost some (I hadn’t). I got home. Nobody was there. I looked in the mirror. My lip was split all the way up to my nose. I called my wife and told her to come get me, but to drop the kids off at the neighbor; they would be freaked out if they saw me this way.
Several stitches later, I was all fixed up, though the resulting scar means I will never look quite as good in a goatee again.
Fall coming down Alpine Loop
This fall’s different in that it was not my fault, and it’s the only time I’ve fallen while on a road bike. I was flying downhill on a mountain road — the Alpine Loop, above the Sundance ski resort in Utah — when a Geo Metro trimmed a corner, coming into my lane and forcing me off the road and into a ravine.
Luckily I was wearing gloves, because now they — not my palms — were shredded. I was bruised and bloody, and my front wheel was taco’d. To his credit, the guy in the Metro was horrified at what he had done. He apologized over and over and insisted on giving me a ride back to town. This meant, sadly, his girlfriend would have to wait on the side of the road for him to come back; the car was not big enough for the three of us and my bike to fit.
On the way down, the guy apologized several times more, then confided he was distracted on the road because he was taking his girlfriend up to a scenic spot to propose to her. I had him drop me off at Sundance so he could get back to his proposal appointment.
My wedding gift to them was I never called to take him up on his offer to pay for damages.
Fall Asleep, Fall off Bike
When Brad and I did the 24 Hours of Moab as a 2-man team, I was cooked by the final lap. I didn’t realize how completely cooked, though. I had noticed for several minutes that my head kept drooping and snapping back up.
Then, suddenly, I was skidding on the sand and my bike was 20 feet ahead of me. Of all the places to fall asleep on this course, I had picked a pretty good one. I was unhurt, and my bike was fine, too. As a bonus, I was once again fully awake.
One Beautiful Moment
From the accumulated clumsiness, one could reasonably conclude that I have no business on a bike, or at least that I should have very high insurance premiums. And yet, one time — just once — I did a move nobody else would try, and I stuck it.
We were at the Timpooneke parking lot after a great ride. Everyone was jousting, fooling around. People had been eyeing a drop — about two feet — between two levels of the parking lot. But you couldn’t just drop it, you’d have to jump over the curb, then land on the flat pavement below. People rode up, then turned away. Finally, everyone went back to their cars to start putting their bikes away.
That’s when I rode up to it, jumped, and landed perfectly. (Okay, really I landed front wheel first, but it was no big deal.)
Nobody could believe it. The cautious guy who nevertheless stacks it up regularly had just casually done a high-consequence move. Better yet, nobody followed my lead after I showed it could be done. It stood unchallenged.
And that — the hope that I will once again, some day, surprise everyone with a moment of agility — is why I keep trying the technical moves.
Comments (11)
09.3.2005 | 6:08 pm
OK, the contest is over, and now it’s time to choose a random number to see who won yesterday’s Fat Cyclist Sweepstakes.
And the random number is…
(Sound of virtual roulette wheel spinning)
…The excitement is killing me….
18!
Congratulations to Jen, who — due to her generous $50 pledge — not only gets the bracelet she’s excited to have my wife make, but also gets a $100 amazon.com gift certificate from me. Nice return on investment, eh?
By way of interesting coincidence, Jen emailed me a few weeks ago urging me to use some charitable purpose as my new weight loss carrot. So I couldn’t be happier that she’s the lucky winner. And while the weight loss aspect of this carrot kind of…um…failed, my friends, family, and blog buddies have helped raise $1034 to help fight MS. That’s very cool. Thanks, everyone.
Crunch
Yesterday, Bob and I went mountain biking on Tiger Mountain. Unlike most people, we like to ride up the technical singletrack. Technical climbing is in fact what most of the people I ride with do best.
It was a great day for riding. It was overcast, but not rainy. The temperature was probably in the high 60s. There were few riders on the trail.
So Bob and I did the first section of the trail, climbing over logs, threading rocks, and just having a great time.
We stopped at a blackberry bush and ate handfuls of the ripe berries, then started up the second part of the trail.
The friends I ride with have a "three-try" rule for technical moves. You are allowed/required to try technical moves three times before moving on. Bob and I stopped at a tall rock ledge at the end of a switchback. Bob had tried it twice and failed. I was on my second try. And while I rarely clean a technical move in three tries, I still play along, hoping that magically, someday, my technical bike skills will blossom.
So I rode up to the ledge, wheelied to get my front wheel up top, and lunged forward. Not good enough. My bike and I started tipping backward. Arms pinwheeling, I jumped back, clicking out of my pedals. I spun around in the air and — amazingly — landed on my feet.
I was so proud of my miraculous save that I struck a gymnast’s dismount pose: Both arms high in the air, feet together. Big smile. Turn and face the audience and bow.
Bob pointed to my bike. "Was that there before?"
No, I can confidently say that was not there before. While I was saving myself, my bike sailed a good ways through the air and landed — top tube down — on a sharp rock.
Ew. I don’t think I can ride that with confidence anymore.
So, my trusty Paragon is dead. On the one hand, I’m seriously bummed. On the other hand: Yay, time for a new bike!
PS to smart bike company marketing types: Want some great publicity from a cyclist with a blog readership of 25,000 per week, as well as a column in cyclingnews.com? All it will cost you is a mountain bike. Contact fatty@fatcyclist.com. Thank you.
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