Bad day today. One of those, I should never have got out of bed days.
I crashed my bike this morning. Again. It was a nasty one and quite frankly it is a miracle that I am as unscathed as I am.
The rather silly thing is that I wasn't even supposed to be on my bike. There was no riding on the program today. Why was I riding? Well to be honest, I like riding. I quite enjoy it outside of all the crazy racing and training stuff. That's my excuse, I was doing something I enjoy.
Kind of wish I hadn't been now though.
So what happened? Well to put it simply, my front wheel came off. While I was riding. This is one of those nightmare scenarios that you wake up from in a cold sweat. I never really thought it would happen to me.
Once my front wheel came off, well you can imagine the rest. It is pretty much like the nightmare. Forks hit the ground shortly followed by me. By pure luck I hit on my left side, so my right shoulder is fine if you can believe it. That was certainly the first thing I checked, closely followed by my left shoulder and collar bone, which was also fine. In fact all that is really sore is my face and my left elbow. I have had my GP neighbour check out the elbow and she assures me it is soft tissue damage only and the bones are fine. It hurts quite a bit at the moment at the extreme ends of movement range, but that is possibly not surprising. Bike crashes can be hard on the body, so some soreness is not surprising.
The face bit is sore because it seems that I used it to break my fall.
Despite my soreness, I honestly do feel very lucky it wasn't worse. By all accounts the crash was spectacular, I am amazed I have walked away so well. Going to be very sore tomorrow I am sure, but hopefully it will improve from there.
So now to the 6 million dollar question, why did my front wheel come off? I am not going to try and pry into that too deeply at the moment. There are some theories bouncing around, but I want to wait until I have chatted to the bike shop before I draw any conclusions. Certainly user error could have been a factor. I had fiddled with my front wheel 30km prior to the crash and I hadn't done it up as tight as it had been. Was it tight enough? I thought so, but now I am less sure. There are a couple of mechanical factors that could have played a part, but I will wait before jumping to that conclusion.
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