DivideOverflow wrote:How did you manage to do that at 15mph??
After you get better, you might want to take a bicycle and practice bailing out in the grass or something... try some tumbles, etc. I don't mean to pick on you, but even the one old lady that dropped her bike at my MSF was able to hop off without getting hurt.
(Guess I missed your crash thread).
First thing, I didn't drop the bike, I
crashed. I experienced a
high-side, which I doubt is what happened to the lady in your class.
It was a total fluke I think.
Here's the earlier thread, but I'll go ahead and explain it again with a little more emphasis on how the injuries happened and the one thing I've figured out that may have prevented the injuries (other than not crashing).
I was doing right practice swerves when I hit one of the cones. This cause my front tire to slide to the left, it then got off the cone, hit pavement, grabbed and I high-sided. It happened so insanely fast there was nothing I could do. Before I even knew what had happened I was on the pavement trying to figure it out, lol.
There's no way I could replicate a crash happening that quickly on a bicycle. And I'm not totally inept at falls and tumbles, etc. I practice an activity called parkour, it's close enough to free-running that if you know what free-running is you'll get the idea.
Really there just wasn't enough time during the crash to even think about going limp or anything. Another reason it was so violent though was that I had my left foot angled out so that the toes were alongside the gear shift lever. So when I flipped over to the left, my toes caught, twisted my foot back under the bike and brought the right side of my body around towards the pavement very forcefully.
So, it wasn't a simple drop like that old lady in your class likely had. It was a crash, I high-sided very very quickly. However, there were 2 things I've figured out that I could have done that would have made a world of difference:
1) If I hadn't hit the cone, can't let myself get distracted.
2) If I had put the ball of my left foot on the peg when I wasn't using the shift lever instead of angling it out. I didn't read about that until after my MSF course unfortunately. If it had been in on the peg, then maybe it wouldn't have gotten caught and twisted and then the right side of my body wouldn't have been pulled around towards the pavement either. I probably would have had basically no injuries.
So, ya, like I said, it was pretty much a fluke.
