Mega Wipeout Story... The beggining
Douche
Posts: 134
Given that my previous posting was so well recevied i thought Id illuminate you all on some of the other crashes ive had over the years.
You'll notice as you read through that each one of my crashes has a common theme. Lack of respect for conditions, be it dark, or wet, or flying round corners blind, or a combination of all three, one thing i consistently fail to do is appreciate the limitations of the conditions and the limitations of my own mortality. As some of you will have already read, about 15 months ago I broke both arms following the mother-of-all-crashes, however in order to pull off a crash of such extreme magnitude and survive you need two things, the first is obviously luck and the second is lots and lots of practise.
I suppose you could describe all my previous crashes as sparring sessions leading up to 'The Big One'. Now the first time I ever remember crashing was at about 8 years old, riding really fast round the garages at the back of my house (alas not for the last time in my life speed was my undoing) essentially I couldnt stop my bike in time to prevent me squarely hitting a 3 foot fence, i didnt quite manage to sail over the fence but for an 8year old I had a damn good try.
The next crash of any note was at 15, I was up on Devils Dyke on the southdowns and rapidly decending on the trail down to the place where i grew up called Mile Oak, it was twilight and light was fading (see!!!! nearly all my crashes involve speed and not being able to see properly where im going) so im flying down the track, problem was that in the halflight the track looked moderatley flat and even ... oh how wrong can one man be... I mean how was I supposed to know that I was actually tracking down the middle of a rut? So when I gestured my bike to go from one side of the track it was obviously hampered by the fact my wheels didnt want to go where my body was heading ... Theres a something slightly disconcerting about bombing down a trail and unexpectedly finding yourself rapidly listing to starboard, obviously gravity soon took hold of me and within no time at all I was experiencing close encounters of the shrubbery kind ... I do have to say that crash is one of my best, not for sheer carnage and devastation, but never before or since have I totally binned it at speed and had absolutley no pain or injury whatsoever, trust me when I say that if we could all bin it at speed and walk away without painful ramifications we'd sell it as a ride at our local fairground ... i know id pay for it
I then managed to go a few years without any major impacts. I see my crashing like volcanic activity, its periodic, comes in clusters, and small ones always lead to big ones, and if we paid attention to the smaller ones we could avoid utter devastation on the big ones .... My next date with destiny eventually arrived, it revolved around a commute back from work. Not that i dislike kids, I have two myself, but you get those middle teen twats who have egos and ideas above their pecking order and cognitive ability, nowadays we call them Chavs. So, once again we have a long straight downhill section, its raining steadily and dark but illuminated, I pick up a good head of speed and see a group teens ahead of me, they see me coming down the hill but make no attempt to move, rather they move further in my way .. "Right you fukers!!" ... I chip up to maximum warp with the intention of riding at them as fast as possible, braking as late as possible, and seeing their faces curl in horror as they brace for an impact that never arrives, I would of course stop millimeters from impacting them, laugh and then carry on my way home smugly entertained, as with most things in my life the way i visioned it wasnt the way it transpired ... My vision of speed was bob-on, and my choice of braking pioint was truly masterful, at around about 10 meters and closing i braked HARD ..... "Houston we have a problem" .... Thing is, even at slow speeds I think one of the most disconcerting things to happen on a bike is a locking of the front wheel, which given the fact it was raining, i was travelling at speed, and braking as hard and with as much strength as my damp little digits could muster, was inevitable. I slid forward on the front wheel for a few feet before it decided it had had enough and promptly dispeared from underneath me, before i could utilise that most versatile of words (Fuk) I was on my belly with arms stretched forward sliding face first along the ground. Now you could argue that my plan had sort of worked, i had indeed approached them fast, i had indeed braked hard, i was now indeed only a few centimeters from them, however it wasnt faces curled in horror I looked down upon, it was faces howling with laughter I was very much looking up at. It wasnt painful as such but that amount humiliation is something noone should ever experience.
Now i should of learnt from that, i should of slowed down, i should of leant the lesson that riding aggressively can bring bad Karma. So there no real surprise when ten days later and on exactly the same stretch of path I had another rude awakening. I was flying along at speed (again) approaching a 'chicane', now there are few things i enjoy more on my bike than tight fast cornering, so given that this was a chicane I did every working day of the week i'd become pretty adept at flicking into the left at speed, flicking right again, and then tightly holding the edge of the path as I exit. Thing is during the day the chicane isnt blind, at night though its a different matter...i was at about 20mph on the entry and shed very little through the turn, so imagine my surprise when about 15 feet infront of me is another cyclist doing exactly the same thing i was doing but only from the opposite direction ... our closing speed was stupidly fast ... neither of had time to brake and being on the fast exit of a corner there was nothing i could do to adjust my line, he was entering the corner so again no time to brake nor adjust the line and less than a second later we hit squarely head on .... i woke up on the floor moments later unable to breathe, to say i was winded is a gross understatement, to say my bike wasn't very well is again a gross understatement, I picked myself up bloodied and battered, as did the person i'd hit. I think we were both in shock cos neither said anything to the other, and after seeing the condition of my bike I was most peturbed to see him sit back on his and start riding away, a small warm feeling entered my heart a few moments later when he stopped, his bike was also truly fukd. Other than winding and properly mashed up hands I was relatively uninjured on that one, though the bike never rode again.
Now the final crash im going to share with you occured about 8 weeks prior to 'The Big One', and it was very much a precursor to it, almost identical infact so god knows how or why i failed to adjust how i was riding, I think maybe my mum dropped me too many times a baby. Im sure you can all see we have a theme on these crashes, every single one of them could of been avoided and if lessons had been learnt subsequent crashes would of never happened.
The precursor to 'The Big One' involved me riding through Watermead Park in Leicester at about 1 in the morning, again it was absolutley pitch black and again i could not see where i was going even slightly, this time i was only doing about 10mph, but the result was all too similiar to what later happened, I hit something on the path i didnt and couldnt see, went straight over the handlbars and landed rather painfully with my bike ontop of me, You'd think that after an event like that the next time it was pitch dark i wouldnt ride, or maybe fit lights to the damn thing, I mean theres no-way on this earth id go to the top of a long decent in total darkness and go for a speedy decent, this time not at 10mph but at 30mph instead, I mean only an absolute and complete moron would do that, wouldnt they?
I like to think that maybe now (if youve read this far!!!) you get my analogy with the volcano. Pay attention to the little eruptions (crashes) cos they often signify a larger eruption (crash) just around the corner ... how large i hark??? well if you carry on like that you'll find out soon enough ... So yeah, me failing to learn lessons from previous crashes resulted in a cataclysmic accident for me with multiple fractures in both arms.
Have I learnt my lesson??? honestly?? Probably not, i get a thrill from riding my bike at speed whatever the weather, it may well one day be the death of me, but as im sure many of you understand, if your gonna die you might as well do it whilst doing something you love, take Senna for example, if he had known he would die in a racing crash would he of continued?? ... of course he would.
You'll notice as you read through that each one of my crashes has a common theme. Lack of respect for conditions, be it dark, or wet, or flying round corners blind, or a combination of all three, one thing i consistently fail to do is appreciate the limitations of the conditions and the limitations of my own mortality. As some of you will have already read, about 15 months ago I broke both arms following the mother-of-all-crashes, however in order to pull off a crash of such extreme magnitude and survive you need two things, the first is obviously luck and the second is lots and lots of practise.
I suppose you could describe all my previous crashes as sparring sessions leading up to 'The Big One'. Now the first time I ever remember crashing was at about 8 years old, riding really fast round the garages at the back of my house (alas not for the last time in my life speed was my undoing) essentially I couldnt stop my bike in time to prevent me squarely hitting a 3 foot fence, i didnt quite manage to sail over the fence but for an 8year old I had a damn good try.
The next crash of any note was at 15, I was up on Devils Dyke on the southdowns and rapidly decending on the trail down to the place where i grew up called Mile Oak, it was twilight and light was fading (see!!!! nearly all my crashes involve speed and not being able to see properly where im going) so im flying down the track, problem was that in the halflight the track looked moderatley flat and even ... oh how wrong can one man be... I mean how was I supposed to know that I was actually tracking down the middle of a rut? So when I gestured my bike to go from one side of the track it was obviously hampered by the fact my wheels didnt want to go where my body was heading ... Theres a something slightly disconcerting about bombing down a trail and unexpectedly finding yourself rapidly listing to starboard, obviously gravity soon took hold of me and within no time at all I was experiencing close encounters of the shrubbery kind ... I do have to say that crash is one of my best, not for sheer carnage and devastation, but never before or since have I totally binned it at speed and had absolutley no pain or injury whatsoever, trust me when I say that if we could all bin it at speed and walk away without painful ramifications we'd sell it as a ride at our local fairground ... i know id pay for it
I then managed to go a few years without any major impacts. I see my crashing like volcanic activity, its periodic, comes in clusters, and small ones always lead to big ones, and if we paid attention to the smaller ones we could avoid utter devastation on the big ones .... My next date with destiny eventually arrived, it revolved around a commute back from work. Not that i dislike kids, I have two myself, but you get those middle teen twats who have egos and ideas above their pecking order and cognitive ability, nowadays we call them Chavs. So, once again we have a long straight downhill section, its raining steadily and dark but illuminated, I pick up a good head of speed and see a group teens ahead of me, they see me coming down the hill but make no attempt to move, rather they move further in my way .. "Right you fukers!!" ... I chip up to maximum warp with the intention of riding at them as fast as possible, braking as late as possible, and seeing their faces curl in horror as they brace for an impact that never arrives, I would of course stop millimeters from impacting them, laugh and then carry on my way home smugly entertained, as with most things in my life the way i visioned it wasnt the way it transpired ... My vision of speed was bob-on, and my choice of braking pioint was truly masterful, at around about 10 meters and closing i braked HARD ..... "Houston we have a problem" .... Thing is, even at slow speeds I think one of the most disconcerting things to happen on a bike is a locking of the front wheel, which given the fact it was raining, i was travelling at speed, and braking as hard and with as much strength as my damp little digits could muster, was inevitable. I slid forward on the front wheel for a few feet before it decided it had had enough and promptly dispeared from underneath me, before i could utilise that most versatile of words (Fuk) I was on my belly with arms stretched forward sliding face first along the ground. Now you could argue that my plan had sort of worked, i had indeed approached them fast, i had indeed braked hard, i was now indeed only a few centimeters from them, however it wasnt faces curled in horror I looked down upon, it was faces howling with laughter I was very much looking up at. It wasnt painful as such but that amount humiliation is something noone should ever experience.
Now i should of learnt from that, i should of slowed down, i should of leant the lesson that riding aggressively can bring bad Karma. So there no real surprise when ten days later and on exactly the same stretch of path I had another rude awakening. I was flying along at speed (again) approaching a 'chicane', now there are few things i enjoy more on my bike than tight fast cornering, so given that this was a chicane I did every working day of the week i'd become pretty adept at flicking into the left at speed, flicking right again, and then tightly holding the edge of the path as I exit. Thing is during the day the chicane isnt blind, at night though its a different matter...i was at about 20mph on the entry and shed very little through the turn, so imagine my surprise when about 15 feet infront of me is another cyclist doing exactly the same thing i was doing but only from the opposite direction ... our closing speed was stupidly fast ... neither of had time to brake and being on the fast exit of a corner there was nothing i could do to adjust my line, he was entering the corner so again no time to brake nor adjust the line and less than a second later we hit squarely head on .... i woke up on the floor moments later unable to breathe, to say i was winded is a gross understatement, to say my bike wasn't very well is again a gross understatement, I picked myself up bloodied and battered, as did the person i'd hit. I think we were both in shock cos neither said anything to the other, and after seeing the condition of my bike I was most peturbed to see him sit back on his and start riding away, a small warm feeling entered my heart a few moments later when he stopped, his bike was also truly fukd. Other than winding and properly mashed up hands I was relatively uninjured on that one, though the bike never rode again.
Now the final crash im going to share with you occured about 8 weeks prior to 'The Big One', and it was very much a precursor to it, almost identical infact so god knows how or why i failed to adjust how i was riding, I think maybe my mum dropped me too many times a baby. Im sure you can all see we have a theme on these crashes, every single one of them could of been avoided and if lessons had been learnt subsequent crashes would of never happened.
The precursor to 'The Big One' involved me riding through Watermead Park in Leicester at about 1 in the morning, again it was absolutley pitch black and again i could not see where i was going even slightly, this time i was only doing about 10mph, but the result was all too similiar to what later happened, I hit something on the path i didnt and couldnt see, went straight over the handlbars and landed rather painfully with my bike ontop of me, You'd think that after an event like that the next time it was pitch dark i wouldnt ride, or maybe fit lights to the damn thing, I mean theres no-way on this earth id go to the top of a long decent in total darkness and go for a speedy decent, this time not at 10mph but at 30mph instead, I mean only an absolute and complete moron would do that, wouldnt they?
I like to think that maybe now (if youve read this far!!!) you get my analogy with the volcano. Pay attention to the little eruptions (crashes) cos they often signify a larger eruption (crash) just around the corner ... how large i hark??? well if you carry on like that you'll find out soon enough ... So yeah, me failing to learn lessons from previous crashes resulted in a cataclysmic accident for me with multiple fractures in both arms.
Have I learnt my lesson??? honestly?? Probably not, i get a thrill from riding my bike at speed whatever the weather, it may well one day be the death of me, but as im sure many of you understand, if your gonna die you might as well do it whilst doing something you love, take Senna for example, if he had known he would die in a racing crash would he of continued?? ... of course he would.
I found it hard, its was hard to find, oh well whatever nevermind.
Boardman Mountain Pro
185 G3 CleanSweep Front
Cane Creek Grips/Ergo Ends
Boardman Mountain Pro
185 G3 CleanSweep Front
Cane Creek Grips/Ergo Ends
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Comments
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You should write a book mate, I would buy it! Hats off to your obvious 'Cohonas' for riding fast in pitch black conditions!0
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Fantastic. I love the Chav tale in particular
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Is any of this true? :shock:
*RUNS OFF*0 -
Brilliant! Love the Chav story.0
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I love the way you refer to your bike as "the damn thing" when you talk about possibly fitting lights to it - brilliant!Specialized Rockhopper '07
Trek Fuel EX8 '090 -
I thought your first thread was great Douche, very entertaining for us, painful for you though!
About learning a lesson, I don't think so. My wife can't believe I still (try to) do jumps and go flying through the woods like I was 18. Every time I hurt myself she starts talking about knee pads, shin pads etc etc. Phah
If you don't push yourself to some degree then where is the adrenaline rush?ride your bike like a kid whilst you still can
Transition Blindside = http://www.flickr.com/photos/traceychalk/5335403095/0 -
kneepads are for skateboarders ..... real men, real cyclists go for the ripping of flesh, afterall, whats more impressive and entertaining? explaining how you managed to scuff a knee pad whilst sliding along the floor or detailing the re-constructive surgery you've just had on your knees due to the patella not being particulary efficient at arresting ones slide??I found it hard, its was hard to find, oh well whatever nevermind.
Boardman Mountain Pro
185 G3 CleanSweep Front
Cane Creek Grips/Ergo Ends0 -
I do remember..
Descending a pretty steep chalky hill(near swanage) and thinking well its wet and the ground must be soft so no brakes. My anally retentive mate who has a speedo thingy claims I was going away from him fast and he was doing forty MPH. All I know was I couldnt see anything other than the difference between light and dark becasue the vibration was so bad. I could see the trail (light) and the grass (dark) suddenly there were two light strips nevermind follow the left one.. sadly the rear wheel had already decided on the right one.
it took about a second before I realised it was going to go wrong and all I could do was hang on. the two trails diverged gradually and I tried very gentle braking.
Instantly the bike whanged sideways and I managed to lay it down onto the slimy chalk and wet grassI stayed hanging on and hit a really muddy bit. On my mates helmet cam the bow wave of mud is pretty spectacular although you cant quite work out what is going on. I came to a stop gradually rotating and still hanging onto the bike. the slide mark was nearly fifty metres long and the out of shape tyre marks extended about thirty metres beyond that.
So apart from shorts FULL of sloppy mud (mmmmmmm!) and a hugely deflated ego I had survived and eighty metre crash unhurt!.
(mind you I lost it again half an hour later and was knocked out)
and having lost bits of myself over the years I would prefer to buy a new kneepad rather than spend ten weeks off the bike becasue I wanted to appear ruggsy!
I have a rugged enough history thanks without trying to water it down with a mountainbike injury!I never touched it! It was broke when I got here.0 -
your a legend matey! a true legend!
the crash stories rock! i know you shouldnt laugh at anothers misfortune but they are so funny! especially the chav one! would have been so Sweet had it worked! and the dark chicane! brilliant!Timmo.
After all, I am Cornish!
http://cornwallmtb.kk5.org/
Cotic Soul, The bike of Legends!
Yes, I Am a bike tart!
http://www.bikeradar.com/forums/viewtop ... 1#162974810
