Ouch

[juliet]

I fell off my bike this morning :-( Turning left off St James' Road onto a side road, and the road must have been slippery as the bike went out from under me. No serious harm done, as I wasn't going fast and basically just went down in a heap. I'm going to have a cracking bruise on my leg, and my back aches a bit. The bike is fine.

Nice drivers (one in car, one in van) waiting to turn out of the side road stopped and checked that I was OK. I am feeling a bit bad because I can't remember if I said thank you, but I'm sure they understood!

Continued to the osteopath. Osteopath tutor came in & did fairly hardcore crunchy thing on lower back. Sudden pain in upper back, burst into tears. Most embarrassing. The osteopaths said that it was to do with your body reacting to the earlier trauma, and also shock, and not to worry, but strongly recommended that I go home and have a nice cup of tea. Which is what I have done.

On the way back I noted that that bit of road has now been gritted. Don't know if someone else came off there, or if the van was a Southwark one & phoned it through. It is strangely cheering, though!

(To forestall any comments about the danger of bikes: in 7 years of daily cycling (somewhere in the region of 20,000 miles, I reckon), including on actual snow, this is the first time I've ever come off like that. I am pretty sure that I've fallen off my own two feet more often than that :-) )

Comments

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Dude! That's... not a bad record by my standards :) But yeah take care of yrself.

[juliet]

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I've had another handful of falls in those 7 years as well:

- in Oxford, took a corner too fast & clipped the kerb. Grazed knee & hand.
- couple of years ago, seatpost snapped. Sprained wrist, badly grazed leg (it scarred).
- 2 x clipless moments during first day or so riding clipless (these don't really count as I was stationary at the time, that being the nature of the clipless moment).
- (most embarrassingly) Rode into a kerb, thankfully very slowly, when looking over shoulder on first time out on Cepheus (audax bike) as I hadn't realised quite how light the handling was.

Still not a bad record, though. I've never had a traffic-related accident.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Yeah my problem (with clipless - or even cleats of any sort) is that a lot of the times when I've stopped, there's still a moving line of traffic beside me. And a lot of my calm mental state on bikes is due to the knowledge that I can in a second flee the bike and be hoofing it to the sidewalk :)

Owow on the seatpost snapping though: I've recently become paranoid that at some point when I'm off-saddle, the axle the pedals are on will go.

[juliet]

If you're stopped, you have one foot unclipped anyway (the classic "clipless moment" being when you forget to do this. Normally on about day 2 of riding clipless, when you're used enough to it not to think about it all the time but not used enough to it not to have to...). It takes a fraction of a second to unclip the other foot - I don't think it would delay me to any significant extent if I had to hop off the bike in a hurry. It becomes entirely automatic - I "unclip" even on the rare occasions I'm wearing flat shoes, now.

Pedal crank or BB snapping = monumentally unlikely. The bit on my seatpost that went was a thinnish lip at the rear of the bit the saddle sits on - poor design TBH and my existing seatposts don't have it.

If you *did* have a crank break, you'd fall off, sure, but unlikely to do serious damage. Break a wrist if you fell awkwardly, maybe, or a collarbone if you were really going and speed.

[htfb.livejournal.com]

I did have a crank snap once, as I stood onto the bike from stationary. It's less likely than your handlebars going, though. Both have opportunities to be really unpleasant.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

I may have mentioned this before but I managed a kerb after the winter beer festival. I was looking at Clare and saying "don't fall off your bike, dear aaargh"