The Ultimate Cycling Injury

takethehighroad

Born out of the tooled up ride thread

Well have you? Some say it's a right of passage to becoming a pro cyclist, some say it's the sign of an oaf...

RichN95.

No, but then I'm not a racer.

I am, on the other hand, a hockey goalkeeper - I've dislocated one or other of my shoulders 18 times (14 times it popped straight back in again).

shinyhelmut

Nope, but then I'm not a pro bike rider.

I have however broken a rib in a bizarre giraffe attack incident.

bompington

Had it well mashed, along with the scapula and a couple of ribs, by a driver who needed the bike lane to get round the traffic queue so he could get to the red light a couple of seconds quicker.
3 years, an astonishingly dilatory insurance company and a helpful firm of ambulance chasers later, it looks like it might get settled sometime soon...
Considering they admitted liability straight away, I was slightly staggered to be told last month that the case was now ready to go to court, the earliest date would be this time next year - but I could opt for a jury trial, in which case 2013 was the earliest available :shock:
So far the lawyers have managed to get the settlement offer to just over 3 times the original one though.

inkyfingers

I was about 10 and riding my BMX onto my parents drive when my uncle (who I didn't know was in the car) opened his car door in front of me and bang!

Keith47

30 years ago was knocked off my bike at night by a bus and dragged for 100 metres underneath. Only breakages were fractured skull (no cycling helmets in those days!) and broken collarbone , but severe lacerations from head to toe, and somehow the right brake lever went through my right wrist. Driver claimed I had no lights (I did) and bus company tried (and failed) to sue me for damaging their bus!!! Hospitalised for 2 weeks and off work for almost 4 months. If something like that happened today I would be rich

No_Ta_Doctor

30 years of cycling (transport and touring, not racing) and I've never had a crash that didn't involve another vehicle (2 with cars, one with a cyclist, and I wasn't much at fault in any of them) and have never suffered worse that cuts and bruises. ***Spends rest of the day touching every piece of wood he can find***

Probably the most painful involved a pedal scraping the length of my shin. But being well 'ard I got back on and rode off. The two with cars didn't leave my bike in any state to be ridden though..... On a side note, the car driver that pulled out of a parking space and knocked me into the lane of oncoming traffic, legs somehow wrapped round the handlebars, felt the full force of some quality anglo-saxon phrasing as I flew through the air, but I was too shocked to say anything much when he came over to apologise.

disgruntledgoat

In a 3s and 4s road race in 2006, coming out of a tight corner and going up a short steep hill the race split into 3 groups, I was at the front of the second group and decided to bridge across.

Made it up the front 5 on my own just going over the brow of another hill and then the guy at the back of the five sat up going over the top. I sprinted straight into the back of him and wobbled into another guy, fortunately I was the only one to go down. Broke my collarbone and took all the skin off my knee. A guy in the chasing group from Lancs Road Club ran me over and flew over the bars as I lay in the road too. He called me a "fupping stupid bustard" or somesuch as he remounted.

LangerDan

Broke mine after a collapse of those much-vaunted "handbuilt wheels". Seeing as when I regained consciousness I was lying across the continuous white line on a blind bend, things could have been worse.

My condition wasn't much improved when I heard the nurses in A&E discussing with the doc how they were going to strap me up. The doctor muttered something and one of the nurses blurted "but isn't that really going to hurt?" Oh great.

Turns out they had to pull the broken ends of the bone apart and guide them back into the correct position. This they achieved by one nurse sticking her knee into my spine, grabbing each shoulder and pulling back (I believe there are places in Europe where you'd pay handsomely for such a service), while a second aligned the break. And the nurse was right. It really did hurt.

tarquin_foxglove

Literally lost count of the number of times I've broken my collar bones (maybe the left one 3 times & the right 4) but I started young when I fell out of a tree & have only done it from coming off a bike twice.

trailstar

i had one slightly "worse" compared to broken collar bone.

I had a 3rd degree seperation of my AC Joint. This is where the collar bone meets your shoulder. It was ripped off completely.. no breaking, just destroyed all the ligaments & muscles in my right shoulder.

6months of physio until i was 100%. Its still not really connected to my shoulder, and i have the end of my collar bone sticking out of my shoulder.. big lump.

It doesnt affect me in riding at all, i just get tired when doing pressups or upper body work.

andylav

Yes, plus 2 broken wrists, broken fingers, concussion, numerous stitches, extensive road rash and 2 broken helmets, though thankfully not all from the same incident !

Most painfully and debilitatingly of all though was a deep seated abscess behind my groin caused by a cyclo-cross style jump onto bike that went wrong (the irony was that it wasn't a cyclo-cross bike I was getting onto)

4 months off the bike last year with original injury - soft tissue trauma, internal bleeding.

7 months and counting this year due to the 2 surgeries to remove the abcess that formed subsequently / repair the damage and recuperation ......

ju5t1n

10 years after the event my RH collar bone is still actually in two pieces. It doesn’t hurt though.

No_Ta_Doctor

andylav wrote:

Yes, plus 2 broken wrists, broken fingers, concussion, numerous stitches, extensive road rash and 2 broken helmets, though thankfully not all from the same incident !

Most painfully and debilitatingly of all though was a deep seated abscess behind my groin caused by a cyclo-cross style jump onto bike that went wrong (the irony was that it wasn't a cyclo-cross bike I was getting onto)

4 months off the bike last year with original injury - soft tissue trauma, internal bleeding.

7 months and counting this year due to the 2 surgeries to remove the abcess that formed subsequently / repair the damage and recuperation ......

I can't help feeling there's a lesson for all of us in there somewhere.....

Pross

Nope, dislocated my shoulder playing rugby though (straight back in but hurt for months).

andylav

No tA Doctor wrote:

I can't help feeling there's a lesson for all of us in there somewhere.....

After reading my own post again I would be inclined to give myself a wide berth in the bunch !

Don't quite know whether I'm proud or appalled at that catalogue of injuries but I've actually saved more crashes than I've sustained over a 25 year period.

In my own defence though, only three of them were my own fault and thankfully those accidents didn't involve anyone else, (the groin abscess, obviously; one of the broken wrists; and the collar bone - front wheel washed out on a wet, road descent on a training ride).

All the others I can firmly point the (broken) finger of blame elsewhere, even if I might have been at fault from poor positioning in some instances and not being able to avoid some else's accident.

Can sort of understand why my boss questions the supposed health benefiits of cycling.....

prawny

Yeah but on an MTB so doesn't really count, twas but a scratch.

fleshtuxedo

That's so 1980s

Scaphoids are the new collarbones

luckao

Nope. Never broken any bones. Come quite close a few times, particularly upon deciding to do an impromptu impression of a superhero taking flight. I did get some bruised ribs for my troubles. Turns out I'm quite lucky/overly cautious.

A guy I work with has just about broken everything. There's also been numerous dislocations, and it appears he's right that it makes him more susceptible to the same injury.

benno68

I broke mine about 8 weeks ago, it's fine now and I was back on the bike after 6 miserable weeks. Someone upfront in the group slowed and I caught a wheel and went down like a sack of ****.

I'm not a racer so I'll put myself in the oaf category.

Pross

I think people have forgotten the 'art' of crashing since the introduction of hard shell helmets (and compulsory helmets in the pro races). You used to see far more broken collarbones as they were sacrificed as riders covered their heads in a crash before they started wearing helmets - now riders seem to have an instinct to keep hold of the bars when they are crashing. It seems to be similar in horse racing to the extent that the British Racing School have bought in mechanical horses to teach their jockeys how to fall properly.

Ginjafro

Amazingly I failed to break my right collar bone when I had a bad stack in a MTB XC race 4 years ago. At the time it was very painful and I thought I must have bust something but it turned out to be severe brusing and torn shoulder ligaments and a chipped ankle too! It took a good 6 weeks to recover

mididoctors

you tuck your head in and roll/do the big fetal dont stick your arm out or try and break your fall

crashed more times than i can remember never broken anything

edit

touch wood

Pretre

Broke mine when I was about 14 - trying to beat a mate down a hill on the way home from school I didn't see a parked car until quite late, moved out to avoid it & caught my mate's wheel. Pretty bad concussion (above story is from what I've been told happened - I have no recollection at all) & a broken right collarbone - hurt like hell for what seemed like months, IIRC.
Only other broken bone is my pelvis in 3 places (although only 2 "count" per the Specialist) 6 months ago - 9 days in hospital, 2 months off work & 4 months on crutches & still hurts a bit somtimes. Not recommended!

luckao

Thought this was interesting.

Everyone knows that it's safer to wear a helmet when cycling. So why do countries like Germany, where few cyclists bother with helmets, have much lower rates of death and injury than the UK, where it's far more common? Welcome to the bizarre phenomenon of 'risk compensation', where protecting ourselves against the hazards just leads to more risk-taking - thus cancelling out any benefits.

The effect has been discovered in studies of everything from anti-lock brakes to child-friendly playgrounds: the safer we feel, the more dangerously we behave. A 2004 study by American researchers revealed that the average speed of skiers wearing helmets was around 10 per cent faster than those without helmets, which may explain why fatality rates have remained more or less constant since the mid-1990s, despite a 40 per cent increase in skiers wearing helmets.

As for cycling helmets, recent research by transport psychologist Dr Ian Walker of the University of Bath suggests that motorists tend to drive closer to cyclist wearing helmets, thus increasing the risk of a collision. On the flip-side, making things seem ore dangerous can lead to people being more careful. Accidents in one major London road feel by 44 per cent in a recent study where road markings and safety railings were removed.

proto

Yes.

Collarbone, wrist, spine, ribs. Three different crahses, all motorcycle related. :oops:

rick_chasey

Luckao wrote:

Thought this was interesting.

Everyone knows that it's safer to wear a helmet when cycling. So why do countries like Germany, where few cyclists bother with helmets, have much lower rates of death and injury than the UK, where it's far more common? Welcome to the bizarre phenomenon of 'risk compensation', where protecting ourselves against the hazards just leads to more risk-taking - thus cancelling out any benefits.

The effect has been discovered in studies of everything from anti-lock brakes to child-friendly playgrounds: the safer we feel, the more dangerously we behave. A 2004 study by American researchers revealed that the average speed of skiers wearing helmets was around 10 per cent faster than those without helmets, which may explain why fatality rates have remained more or less constant since the mid-1990s, despite a 40 per cent increase in skiers wearing helmets.

As for cycling helmets, recent research by transport psychologist Dr Ian Walker of the University of Bath suggests that motorists tend to drive closer to cyclist wearing helmets, thus increasing the risk of a collision. On the flip-side, making things seem ore dangerous can lead to people being more careful. Accidents in one major London road feel by 44 per cent in a recent study where road markings and safety railings were removed.

While I'm sure the findings are accurate - isn't this rather like the argument that you should have a big, very sharp knife pointing out from the steering wheel towards the chest of the driver in every car so that they drive very carefully, if they even drive at all.

There's an argument to say that enforcing compulsary helmet rules result in less pickup in cycling, esp in children - with the usual "if you cycle as a child you're more likely to ride when you're older" argument, and that that loss of people living fitter lifestyles by cycling is a greater cost to public health than the (real) cost of people not wearing helmets. If that makes sense. This is all rather OT mind.

Richrd2205

Rick Chasey wrote:

While I'm sure the findings are accurate - isn't this rather like the argument that you should have a big, very sharp knife pointing out from the steering wheel towards the chest of the driver in every car so that they drive very carefully, if they even drive at all.

There's an argument to say that enforcing compulsary helmet rules result in less pickup in cycling, esp in children - with the usual "if you cycle as a child you're more likely to ride when you're older" argument, and that that loss of people living fitter lifestyles by cycling is a greater cost to public health than the (real) cost of people not wearing helmets. If that makes sense. This is all rather OT mind.

Och no, not the helmet debate, please let that be limited to Cake Stop!
& Campaign
& everywhere else
But surely not Pro Race.....

KentS

I haven't broken mine, but I do not race.