Bike Wreck

Well, as most of you know now, I had a little mishap on my mountain bike. Nothing serious really, but it's all I've had in a while to blog about, so I guess I will. It was a combination of a few things that caused it. I had brand new brakes put on my bike; this was my first time riding since then, so they were extra good at stopping me. I was going downhill at a normal speed (nothing too careless or excessive) when I bumped a rock or something on a tricky corner which threw me off balance. Unfortunately, when something like this happens, my body goes into panic mode and my reflexes override my decision making process. Being thrown off balance, all my weight was on the left side of the bike. That combined with my reflexes caused me to be squeezing my front brake with all my weight. Before my brain kicked back in, I ran into a rock or something and up and over I went with my bike behind me. It would have been a simple crash except that my cheek bone struck a rock on the ground as my head came down.

You can see from these pictures that it wasn't too bloody. My face is all scabbed over now. But you can see in the pic where I'm not smiling, a slight darkness around my eye. In the last two days that has developed nicely into a purple and black eye. So now my cheeks all bruised, I have a black eye, and I'm all scraped up. If I can't get a girlfriend from all this I don't know what else to do. It hurts to chew, so eating's no fun. But I am very lucky because it could have been much worse. I didn't break anything on my body or my bike. I think we're going to try that trail again over Labor Day!!

After this wreck we made it back to the car and headed over to Jamba Juice and got ourselves something to drink. Then we headed over to REI for their Labor Day sale and got some clothes and cool bike accessories. THEN I headed home and got all cleaned up. It sure made my trip to REI that much more authentic looking like this, I felt like I fit right in.