Man vs Pavement

After what my records say is 12,101 miles of mostly event free riding since I got my first road bike in 2002, my number came up today and I put the bike sideways.

I was making a left hand turn at a 3 way intersection (I didn't have a stop sign) and looked over my shoulder heading into the turn and saw a guy on a hog with a chick on the back. I was far enough ahead to where I didn't think he'd try to come around me, and started to make the turn. As I was about a qtr of the way into the turn, I heard him twist the throttle and it sounded like he was speeding up. As I looked over my shoulder, I saw him coming pretty close, and heard him yell something at me. It all startled me a bit and I'm not sure if I touched the breaks, or if it caused me to swerve a bit in the apex of the turn, but as I looked back to the road in front of me, the bike was coming out from under me and I went over on my left side, forearm to pavement. The pavement won - the biker and his chick rode on. Thanks asshole!

The worst of it all was that somewhere in the crash, I took the handle bars or elbow pad to the aero bar to my right leg, right at the hip flexor/groin, about 2 inches from my man business. I have got a deep bruise there, and can't lift my leg at the waist much higher than is necessary to walk. The left hip has very minor road rash, my shorts didn't even rip. It was my forearm that took the brunt of the fall, and it is scraped up with road rash pretty good. About 6 inches starting near the elbow running about 2/3 of the way up to the wrist.

I was 40 minutes into a 3 hr ride, so I'm not happy about the training volume shortfall that resulted from the crash. The bike was not rideable, but should be fine with a new front brake cable, set of bar tape, and a trued front wheel. The front brake cable and bar tape are only a week old having been replaced last weekend. Bad luck there.

I downloaded the ride data to see what my HR did during the crash. I was cruising along on a flat stretch at around 18.0 mph and a 136 HR. As best I can tell, I crashed between 39:00 mins and 39:02 mins and was going 15.8 mph at 135 bpm. My HR peaked at 39:09 at 150 bpm and stayed there until 39:16 before it began to drop. The data stopped recording at 39:19. Pretty interesting.

I'm sure I can't run right now, but wonder how long it will last. I'm icing my leg as I type, and it feels better now than it did before I iced it the first time, but I expect to be very sore tomorrow morning.

I do have a race on the calendar a week from today that I'd really like to do, but we'll just have to play it slow and see how it goes. I'm going to skip my swim planned for tomorrow morning and will see about a light jog tomorrow night. If that goes well, I'll jump back on the schedule come Tuesday. If not, I'll just continue to play it day by day. Next week is supposed to be 12.5 hour week with much of the work front loaded to give me a day of recovery before the race, but that plan appears to be in jeopardy.

Be careful out there.