Firstly I cracked two ribs and my helmet in September, nearly burst my bellend in another, trashed my wrist a few times, but my most recent crash is worth thinking about..
If you read the last few blog entries you may know that I have been racing and training with two more broken ribs. So on a recent ride I decided to revisit the spot where I went down and piece together what the hell happened.
Picture this.. I am riding a Custom Steel frame, on loan from the shop, to give it some welly and an idea of how new geometry was working. I had been riding pretty well...
My regular Whitely Woods loop , gentle down hill approaching this:
gentle slope, a bit mucky, but fast and smooth..
I am doing 15.2 mph ( I checked on my GPS track after)
getting closer:
SO shift weight back a bit and pop a gentle manual to clear the tiny puddle..
can you see it yet ??
That red circle is a tree root sticking up just above the surface. to the left of it is a submerged step , only a few inches high but enough to seriously smack your front end. that root isn't straight either.. hit it and it will shove your wheel to the left.. invisible and a serious dampner as I found out.
basically I hit it hard, I remember trying to pop the front, to lighten it through the puddle, but smashed something very hard and ended up in the bush to the right.
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No buckled wheel, bent shifter, but no apparent damage. Only later I felt a real pain in my achilles where the pedal caught it and my ribs .. i eventually went to A&E to get them checked as I was not sure whether I had cracked a shoulder blade.
It was only washing the bike down after Winchesters race did I notice this:
That is a fucked frame. James had noticed a gouge in in the bars where the stem clamps, but we had both missed this..
such an innocuous puddle causing all this hassle.
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