Mountain Biking: Senor Pain Jumps...

...out of the frickin' forest and chucks me ass over shoulders down a steep trail this morning... Maybe it was a half gainer, shit, I had about a quarter of a second to analyze the situation).

OK, you'd think I would have learned something from the event on Saturday, right?

Wrong.

Did I take my cell phone with me, like I promised I would after seeing how helpful they were yesterday to call ambulances for hurt dudes. I had it in the truck when I got there to ride this morning. I got my bike out of the back of my Tundra, cell phone in hand, then I try to find a place to put it.

There is no place to put my cell phone. Damn.

Fanny packs seems a little 'weird' to me, and I don't have a camel pack for water yet, they have those lil mesh pockets hoobs to put stuff in. Like keys.

Or a cell phone.

My shorts don't have pockets, either. What to do... what to do...

Trying to hang it on the tie string of the padded pull over seat cushion is a no go. Thought maybe I could flip the cell phone cover open and clip it like a clothespin over. No way at all that was working.

"Crap. OK, I'll just leave it then."

I toss the phone back in the truck, lock it, mount up the bike, and off I go.

The trails are great about 7:30 in the morning, fairly quiet, a few other riders out. I get to the spot where Larry bit it yesterday, go down it (maybe a little more cautiously, sure), no worries.

I get past the 3.5 mile mark, fill up with water, keep going, the trail past that point is somewhat tougher, not a big deal though. I'm not that big of a badass as far as mountain bikers go, so I'm not exactly setting new land speed records out there.

(Cut me some slack on this, I only started riding trails a couple of months ago.)

So, I'm cruising along, then I come to this downhill trail, it's probably no more that a 45% angle down, but it is sort of long and rocky, ragged grooves in it. So I get a little speed up, feeling confident in myself.

Looking back at it, I was probably going too fast. Yeah.

I'm about halfway down, and it suddenly occurs to me that I'm not really on my bike anymore. In mid-air, I think and may even utter the words, "Shit! Shit!" I think the second 'Shit!' was as I deftly slammed my forearms to the ground and roll left, crashing my lower back ribs (baby back ribs... mmm...) onto a really hard, lumpy stone on the ground.

Hopping to my feet faster than I believe possible after that little stunt, I suddenly really feel the pain in back. Ouch, yeah, it is hurting. My beady eyes dart side to side, listening.

OK, cool. Nobody else saw that little bit of amateur gymnastics. Good.

Wow, my back is hurting. I'm thinking about my cell phone now and how it is in my truck over 4 miles away.

It is really quiet out there.

The pain isn't quite as bad as it should be if something is really jacked up, so I slowly stand up straight. My forearm is bleeding some and my back is talking to me now, wondering what the hell is going on.

I look around, my bike is just laying there, laughing at me, no worse for wear. As I pick it up, I give it a shake to see if any parts, mine or its, fall off. All clear.

This is the point of the ride where I decide to take that as getting off with a warning, and figure I'd better not tempt fate further for today and just head back. Amazingly enough, I suffer no more hills trying to re-enact Custer's Last Stand on me or my bike.

I wish I would have taken a Before/After picture, I've only taken an After photo of my arm and back. This morning, they just looked scraped up, but about 12 hours later, I am officially Super Bruised on both arm and back.

What did I learn from all this?

Don't worry if a fanny pack looks sort of ghey, wear it just so you can carry a phone, because you never know when Senor Pain is jump out at you.

(I'll post pics of my arm and ribs tomorrow.)

The Dangers of Mountain Biking

I had an action-packed morning. Got up early, packed my bike up and went out to the trails at Lake Grapevine in the DFW area. I was riding along, and came to a rocky dropoff on the trail about a mile or so in, and a guy (probably mid to late 40's) was sitting off to the side of the trail at the bottom of the dropoff, his bike just laying in the trail at the base.

I said, "Are you ok?". He said, "I don't know, I just had a bad fall." Just from the way he was acting, I knew something was wrong, he was crouched over and not very coherent. He was holding his side, obviously in a lot of pain. I jumped off my bike, hopped down the hill, and checked his eyes, took off his helmet and scanned his head and neck for signs of trauma. Luckily he was wearing a helmet. I asked him what his name was (Larry, he works for Verison). I asked him if he could stand, tried to help him up, and his legs gave out underneath him. He got his wits about him a little bit after that, I asked him if he knew how long he had been down for, he said he thought for just a few minutes, so it must have happened right before I got there.

At that point, it was time to call an ambulance. A guy named Cory was out running on the trails, he came up after I found the wreck, he called 911 while I ran back up the trail to see what the closest crossroads were. I ran up the road, hopping fences and knocking on doors, but no one was up yet, so I just jogged down to the end of the road to get the intersection info to pass on to the dispatcher. When I got back to the accident site, Cory said that he had seen Larry getting out of his SUV when he got to the parking lot, so Larry had been just a few minutes ahead of us on the trail.

Luckily, we were very close to a road (McPherson and Seacoast, I think it was). He was pretty badly shaken up, said his vision was all blurry. He may have cracked a rib when he fell. He was able to call his wife on his cell phone, and told her we had an ambulance on the way, then he had to lay down because of the wooziness and pain.

I called his wife on his cell and told her that the paramedics had arrived, and that Cory and I would meet her at the parking lot with his bike and gear. She dropped her son off at the parking lot to pick up Larry's Infiniti SUV while she went out to Grapevine Hospital. The ambulance got to the scene within 10 minutes, and they put a neck brace on Larry, packed him on a backboard, and carried him up the trail to the ambulance. We helped them carry their gear back to the ambulance, they took our names and phone numbers, and that was that. Cory and I walked his bike back to the parking area, and Larry's son met us on the trail, he was a young guy, 15 or 16 years old, looked a little freaked out. He took his Dad's bike back down, and Cory went back to finish his run. I was just on a short ride, so I head back to the parking lot. A very different adventure for me this morning, wasn't expecting to come across an accident like that.

I think he's gonna be all right, but he said that he was supposed to go climbing with his family next week in the Grand Tetons, I don't think that is gonna happen now.