too many words by laura lemay

crash!

I had an exciting weekend. How about you?

I went on a bike ride on friday, cause it was nice, a little wet, but nice. It was hard. My butt hurt. I’m slow. I went on another ride on sunday, cause it was even nicer, and less wet. Its the new year and I’ve been slacking off and I want to get back into riding again. Working at the purple company has meant free soda and espresso all the time and… I kind of need to work out more now (guilty expression).

So I was on my bike riding through San Jose and I was on a perfectly flat road and there was no traffic and it was just totally boring and ordinary. I wasn’t even riding very hard, like 12 miles an hour and I was about a hundred yards from where I had to get into the left turn lane so I leaned over left to look over my shoulder to see if there was anyone coming and I took my hand off the bars to stick it out for the signal.

I vaguely remember kind of losing my balance and then all of a sudden there was a nice man there next to me saying “why don’t we get you up out of the road.” He gave me my glasses, which were all smashed. My hand was bleeding a lot. He gave me a napkin to wipe up the blood, and asked me a lot of hard questions I had trouble answering for a while (was I OK, etc).

The nice man and his wife put my bike in the back of his SUV and they drove me all the way back to my car. They kept saying it was so not a big deal, they were just coming from church, they were just in the neighborhood looking at houses, they live right nearby, they just wanted to make sure I was OK. I didn’t get their names and I was too confused to do much but thank them for their kindness. Bless you, nice church people from San Jose.

I have no idea what happened. My bike is trashed on the left side (poor ultegra combo brake/shifters: mangled) but I’m all bashed up on the right. I have big bruises on my knee, hip, elbow, and shoulder. I can’t breathe all that well but it appears to be just really bad pulled muscles in my chest and shoulder and back. Road rash all on my knuckles and my elbow. I tore up the thumb on my left hand something fierce but I pasted all the bits back on with New Skin and they seem to be holding together. My helmet is toast; scratched and dented all to hell. My head is fine. Yay helmet. I have one tiny scratch on my forehead that I think was from my glasses. Glasses: DOA. 🙁

I was just kind of sore yesterday but today is nasty. I’m working through my hoard of pharmaceuticals and I’ve got the pain down to a dull roar. I am ok as long as I don’t walk around or cough or laugh or bend over or take off or put on clothes or drive. Basically if I sit very very still and breathe shallowly I’m just fine.

I’d really like to know what happened so I could NOT DO IT AGAIN.