I logged on the to the mountain bike forum this past Monday and saw the headline that gave me pause. "Rider Down"...
We all know crashing comes with the territory when we ride and I've been intimate with both the pavement and the trail more times that I'd like to admit. This time though, it was someone I knew and the news was bad....really bad. He had been airlifted and was in a coma at the regional hospital.
A buddy I've ridden with several times and seen at the trail as well as various races a lot, had crashed pre-riding the Sea Otter Classic when his front wheel went in to one of the myriad of ruts on a long fast downhill. Jerry is an extremely strong rider and a tremendous bike handler so it's not like he was a newb that made a dumb move. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what happened other than he hit a rut, went over the bars and landed on his head.....
For me, crashes usually happen in one of two ways. The first is the kind where you're out of control, know things are going south and actually have time to think of just how much the following events are going to suck. The one that sticks in my mind is the time I was riding down a fast flowing trail, saw a creek, pulled up too late and knew my attempt at a bunnyhop wasn't going to carry me across.
My rear wheel hit a rock mid-creek. The back of the bike launched up and over my head as I slowly headed face first for the ground. Luckily I was able to tuck my head, complete the airborn somesault and land flat on my canelback in the middle of the trail. Thankfully, my rear wheel and my camelback were the only real victims in that case.
The other type of crash is the one where you're grooving along loving life and the next thing you know you're wadded up in a heap wondering what in the hell just happened. This is pretty much exactly what happened both when I fractured my elbow at Demo and more recently, when I crashed my road bike. One minute I'm thinking about how awesome the day is, tucking in to a nice fast downhill right hander and the next thing I know, some guy is standing over me saying "dude, you just slid all the way across the road, are you ok?"
There's an old saying that riders fall in to two categories, those that have gone down or those that will go down. all we can hope for is that when it happens, it's not major and it doesn't keep us off the bike for very long.
In Jerry's case, it is major and chances are it will keep him off the bike for a while. All we can do is continue to pray and hope he comes out of the coma quickly and completely and with no lasting effects.
As we used to say to the moto riders, be safe and keep the rubber side down.....
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