My Bike Wreck

I feel embassed explaining how I wrecked on my bike and broke my hip. But here is the truth. Sometimes when I want to get in a quick training ride after work and don't have time to load up my bike and gear and drive to Mission Trails, where I normally ride the singletrack trails, I do a few laps around Veteran's High School which is close to my house in Mission. There is a sidewalk that runs around the perimeter of the school that is about a mile long. So after a day of work I feel like getting in a quick ride around the school. I gear up and ride out on Giant Anthem X2 for some laps. I had done these rides hundreds of times before with no problems.

I do one warm up lap and started to pick up the pace on the second lap when I come too close to a school sign. I clip the steel post with my left handlebar grip which spins my handlebars 180 degrees and throws me off the bike. My right hip bone takes the full brunt of the fall hitting the concrete sidewalk squarely on the bone. I was doing at least 15 mph when I clipped the post. The wreck was instantaneous.

I lay on my side on the ground. I had fallen before so I didn't feel too bad. I knew I was in trouble when I tried to get up and couldn't. I thought maybe I had just stunned the bone so I laid on the sidewalk longer hoping I could get up in a minute or two. Luckily there are a lot of walkers and joggers who walk and jog around the school. Several stop to ask if I was ok. Being a man, I say, "I'm ok" and try to shake it off. I ask someone to help me up and using my good right leg and my bike as a crutch I hop and wheel myself maybe ten feet. But I realize I am not going to make it. I had left my cell phone at my house so I didn't have my wife's number. I called our main home number using a jogger's phone, but my wife doesn't answer. We get a lot of telemarketing calls so she usually never answers the home phone. I am less than a block from my house and I can't make it home. Finally, I swallow my manly pride and ask a walker for help. He flags down a guy in a truck who loads my bike and me on the tailgate and takes me home to my wife.

My wife and the guy, who turns out to be a new neighbor who had just moved into our subdivision, help me in the house. It's bad. I can't put any pressure on my right leg or hip, and if I try an excruiating pain shoots through my right hip. I sit helplessly on my living sofa while my wife calls her mom and dad and a good neighbor of ours who is a DPS trooper and his wife. They all come over and after feeling some more pain I come to the realization that I need to go the hospital. So they carry me to the car. My wife quickly gathers some of my things and my older son, Greg, drives me to Mission Hospital.

I need to think of some more manly excuse for wrecking like, I was going down the Bike Breaker backward....or I was hucking off a ten foot drop...Something. Breaking my hip while doing laps around the school is just plain embarrasing for a mountain biker.