Chapter Fifteen
Crashes—Cycling's Dark Side
I often think about crashing. More at night than when riding. In bed, the idea of riding on the freeway with a 70 MPH, 40-ton logging truck three feet from my elbow is troubling. When I’m on the bike, however, it seems a lot tamer.
But even without “cagers” (that is, car and truck drivers) crashing is an issue you have to consider.
I’ve fallen a few times. I was riding over a frozen foot/bike bridge in Michigan, and I was thinking, will I fall if I put on the brakes? I couldn’t resist trying it, touched the brakes, and down I went. So I got the answer to my question: yes.
When I first tried clip-in pedals (aka clipless pedals), I stopped on the shoulder, my feet remained stuck to the pedals, and I fell neatly into the #2 lane of the California 101 freeway. It almost became the #2 lane, literally. Don’t picture a Los Angeles freeway, there are many fewer cars here. With some bad luck, however, I would have checked in to Motel Deep Six.
My worst crash happened in a pace-line (cyclists riding close to one another in a line to reduce wind resistance) during the Wildflower century. The guy in front of me slowed, and all the dominoes went down. I was out of the cycling business for a month or two.
But the crash that made me reconsider cycling as a hobby was Lena’s major mishap on a bicycle path in Redding, California. The curves on this hilly section of the trail were much sharper than those you find on a regular road. Think about it, a path can have a turn with a radius of only 20 feet.
Lena was riding 30 seconds ahead of me. I came around a curve, and found her on the ground, bloody and not moving. You can see where this happened in this picture that displays the data from my GPS cyclocomputer. She was coming downhill from the top of the picture, and I found her at the yellow X.
I thought she was just resting after being shaken up. No, she was AWOL. Her bike was on top of her. I called for an ambulance, but it was hard to describe to them exactly where we were, I ended up giving them the latitude and longitude from my cyclocomputer.
The lights gradually came on, but there was still nobody home. She kept asking the same questions over and over. Her helmet was cracked.
I finally heard the ambulance chugging up the bike path after 30 minutes. Apparently this didn’t qualify for using the siren or driving fast. I thought it was pretty serious, but what do I know, I’m not a lawyer.
At the hospital we found that she had five cracked and broken ribs, scraped pizza here and there, and no other broken bones. All of those things were serious, but not worrisome. The worrisome part, and the part that made me reconsider cycling, was the bleeding on the brain (subarachnoid hemorrhage). The docs put her in the ICU, and told me that if the bleeding, causing an increase in intracranial pressure, didn’t stop by morning, they would have to drill a hole in her skull.
The bleeding did stop in time to avoid surgery, and it turns out that having the prior brain tumor operation may have helped out here. Lena has a big square “trap door” bone flap in her skull from that earlier repair job, held in place by scar tissue. It expanded outward a bit, possibly helping to relieve pressure.
When considering whether riding is worth the risk, you might say “Well, everything has its dangers. You can’t live your life in fear. And being a couch potato is dangerous to your health.” Little phrases like that are just glib ways of avoiding a very difficult decision. When you are in the ICU wondering whether your wife will live or die, the risks are much less abstract. In other words, in the ICU with the machines, tubes, and smells, you say “I don’t want this to ever happen again. I don’t care about the probabilities.”
And of course it could have been much worse. Members of bikeforums.net talk about being in comas, or having permanent deficits, but still riding.
Lena vowed never to ride again, and I was thinking along the same lines, but as time separates us from the experience, we move back to the “Just do it!” philosophy. We did buy new helmets, the best we could find—POC Trabec Race helmets with MIPS protection.
One friend, when I talked about never riding again, said “It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing thing. You can just decide to ride on less dangerous roads.” He’s right, and that’s good advice, but I reminded him that this happened on a tame bike/pedestrian path.
Lena still doesn’t remember the crash. Our guess is that she was going a little too fast for the curve, and slid on some gravel, using her ribs to break her fall.
The bleeding on the brain stopped, and she made a full recovery. She was released after two days. I asked one doctor whether he thought the bill would exceed our $7,000 deductible. He got a good laugh out of that. The total bill was $145,000.