Cycling’s Greatest Misadventures, edited by Erich Schweikher.
Best book about cycling I have ever read. The opening quote from Jack London, of all people, lays out the thesis:
Oh, to just grip the handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you’re going to smash up. … And then go home again after three hours of it, into the tub, rub down well, then into a soft shirt and down to the dinner table, with the evening paper and a glass of wine in prospect – and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!
Success in triathlon is certainly limited by one’s tolerance for cycling. Personally, I am catholic in my cycling tastes. At times, I have overdosed on commuting, mountain (off road) biking, tandem rides with family, multi-day tours in a group, roadie rides, sweaty hours on the trainer, and flat out mystical explorations. Many cyclists tend to stay within their own little sub world of roadies, or tri-geeks, or dirt bag MTBers (with sub-sub sets of downhillers, free riders, and cross country), or city commuters, or messengers. And each disdains the others. This book breaks down those barriers, and includes tales of trauma from all points of the bicycling compass. Bike often enough, and something’s bound to happen. This book documents the possibilities.
The prologue is two short little crash stories, both from triathletes, who fall in a parking lot, and in spin class. Whimsical, yes, but still a good place setter for the myriad ways men and women can get themselves into and out of trouble just by pedaling along. Two explorers hack through a Peruvian jungle trying to follow an Incan trail down from the Andes. A mountain bike veteran, solo riding from Canada to Mexico on the Great Divide Trail, links up with a pair of erratically prepared riders in the middle of Wyoming’s Red Desert. The first bike in a rural Hindu village, an aborted tour down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, and a close encounter between a souped up Camaro and a Pittsburgh bike messenger all provide exotic flavors for this melange. The occasional true tragedy reminds us that bicycling, like all pleasures in life, can leave a bitter taste as well.
A commuter traps urban wildlife in her front spokes. In the woods, a bear attacks, and bikers react. Along “L’Etape de Tour”, a single stage ride on the Tour de France course in which thousands annually participate, a 40-something roadie with dreams of glory actually finishes ahead of Miguel Indurain (the first man to win five consecutive Tours.) An Engineer in the Army Corps tours his city, the Big Easy, 6 months after Katrina. A doctor with a single failing kidney braves L’Alpe D’Huez, and other classic French mountain tours. People fall off their bikes in ways I never could imagine, with results both funny and tragic. To drive the point home, a 16 page photo collection of All-Star crashes is included.
Personally, I HATE to crash on my bike. Much worse than falling while skiing, ice skating, running, or swimming. I do my level best to stay upright, even if the bike is going down. While I’ve experienced nothing like the horrors and laughers in this book, I do have my own personal favorite bike crash story. (Remember, I fell on the ice about 4 months ago, but that was squarely in the “mundane” category.)
Sometime last century (in the 90s), I was riding my mountain bike down my local dirt trail. The Cushman power lines run from the dam in the western Olympic foothills across the Kitsap Peninsula to the Tacoma Narrows, into the big city which built it all, and uses the hydropower. Just before leaping the mile wide Narrows, the high voltage wires intersect Gig Harbor, next to our little freeway, Rt 16. Back then, the power lines were serviced by a dirt road, smack in the middle of the burgeoning subdivisions, affording a little escape from my home down to the Sound. Now, the way has been paved, and is crowded with dog walkers, skateboarders, waddling joggers, and serious power walkers, as well as myriad forms of two wheeled transport.
But in the old days, before the turn of the century (I like saying that, just as I like saying “I LOVE the 21st century” when I see something like electronic medical records or TV shows on an iPhone), no one used the trail except for us dirt bikers. One evening, I went zooming along the washboard road, as I’d done so many times before, hoping to get a little walk along the crackly rocks at water’s edge down at the base of the trail under the Narrows Bridge (there was only one then.)
About half a mile into the trip, without any warning or obvious trail hazard, I suddenly went flying to the air, aiming for the ground on my left side. I hit shoulder first, the classic way to break your clavicle on a bike, but didn’t snap the bone, just rolled around the shoulder joint and roughed up the rotator cuff quite a bit.
After cursing, and finding I was basically OK, I huffed my way up, and looked back for my bike. Both wheels were “taco’d” – actually, more “potato-chipped” in appearance, but taco’d is the correct bike lingo here. Puzzled, I wandered around, trying to find out what had happened. No rocks or potholes, no sudden obstacles of any kind. I had been going in a straight line, a little bit up hill after a small drop, nothing dramatic or difficult or technical in any way. My left thigh had a mark on it which look like a mirror image of the handle bar, which, along with the bent wheels, told me the bike must have suddenly stopped moving forward, and my momentum carried me on over the bars and into the dirt.
I had not applied the brakes (remember, I was going a little UPHILL at the time), so SOMETHING must have stopped me. It was almost as if a giant hand had reached up out of the ground and grabbed my rear chain-stay, holding me fast.
The power lines back then were held in place by guy wires secured into the earth. I went over to the closest one, which was about 18 inches off my line of travel. As it exited the ground, angling away from the trail up to the power pole, the multi-stranded metal wire had begun to unravel, leaving a foot long piece sticking straight out towards the trail.
I went back to my bike, and looked at the rear derailleur cage. Sticking out of the chain was the remaining 6 inches of the wire, still stuck fast between the jockey pulley and the chain. As soon as it got trapped in there, it had stopped me like a poor crash test dummy.