LuCaspeRobin + Thomas ;-)

It's been a while since this has happened to me (not since I was a bike-courier in Oslo), but today I fell of my bike. Well, flew off and over my bike is a better expression. What happened?

I was biking along like I usually do to catch the 7:17 am train to the Hague, where I work now. Just before coming to the trainstation, there's a quick left, right, left combination of corners. Normally no sweat, but for some reason this morning I came to close to the kerbstones. SMACK! I hit the kerb with my right pedal and then followed mayhem.

The bike stopped instantly, but as all good physicists and other smart people know, mass cannot stop in an instant, it will always try and push on if halted. So also the mass of my body. It flew over the handlebars, smacked down on the ground and trew me around on my back. There I was, all spreadeagled on the ground, too stunned to speak. Luckily a fellow biker stopped and turned and came back to inquire on my health. Apart from a bruised ego, a little hole in my hand and a very painful elbow, everything was alright. Except for my fold-away bike. The right handlebar was all crooked and the main stem of my steering was all bent.

I decided it as better to go home first and relax my adrenaline-pumped-up body and tend to my wounded elbow. It turned out to be no more than chaffed skin, but boy does that hurt the first couple of days! The next morning was a lot worse however. As my body had been pumped up with adrenaline the day before, the day after my body decided to tell me that all my muscles had worked overtime to make sure no other harm would come to me during and after the fall. I could hardly work and felt all 300 muscles in my body complaining about me getting up and out of bed! So the next day I took everything slow, knowing it will take a couple of days before I'm back to normal. Especially my back which doesn't like these flying moments ;-)

Posted by Sebastiaan Naafs - van Dijk | top