Me and my technicolour dream skin

Well, it's sunny this lunchtime, Simon & Garfunkel's live concert from Central Park in the late 70s/early 80s is playing, and I'm feeling good. All that despite having my most spectacular mountainbike crash ever yesterday afternoon.

I think I actually flew. It's difficult to be sure because I was riding on my own and hence there were no witnesses. However, I reckon I must've been airborne for two-to-three seconds. I think I somersaulted though, so figuring out which way up I was and which way I was pointing is kinda difficult. It all happened pretty quickly too.

I should've known it was coming. I'm still tweaking the front changer/chainset set-up and I managed to lose the chain off the smallest chainring as I was climbing earlier on in the ride. I couldn't 'ride' the chain back on and eventually ran out of momentum and had to unclip my feet and stop. It was only when I started to fiddle around with the gears and try to wind the chain back onto the chainring that I realised I must've ridden through the largest pile of dogshit known to humankind.

It was mustard-yellow, stank to high heaven, and had managed to get everywhere. The largest blob was on one of the cranks, but it had also spread all over the bottom bracket assembly, one of the pedals, the down tube of the frame, and even one of the handlebar grips. Somehow in the process I managed to get a small chunk of it on my left glove too. I'll try not to slip into a tirade about irresponsible dog owners...again...but what the fuck?! It's disgusting! Not to mention extremely unhygienic! I had to wheel the bike uphill to the next suitable dense clump of wild grass so I could clean the shit off my glove first of all. That's crucial because the water pipe from my Camelbak routes over my left shoulder, and I use my left hand to remove the dustcap from the mouthpiece whenever I want to take a drink.

Can you imagine happily riding along, using muscle memory to remove the dust cap and take a drink without even looking, and then suddenly realising you have dogshit in your mouth? Fuckin' YUK!

After that I made a point of riding through as many puddles as possible from those I encountered. When I dropped back into Taylor Creek Park I also rode at the perfect speed through one of the fords to give the whole bottom half of the bike a good rinse.

Blurk. Just the smell of it.

Anyway, I've been eating better lately and felt stronger as a result. I'd eaten a banana just before leaving the house too, and had a Camelbak chinking with ice cubes. As a result I wasn't necessarily fast on the South bound riverside trail, but I was expeditious. Smooth. The chainring got stuck again on the gravel hill at the end but I managed to reroute it by hand onto the smaller chainring, enabling me to battle the technical Northbound trail.

The technical stuff was pretty smooth too. I even saw a Raccoon en route. It looked at me with a bored expression on its face. As it wasn't going to do anything exciting anytime soon, I rode on. The rear mech is set perfectly now, so I zipped up and down the freewheel, through the three downhills from the Loblaws parking lot corner, over rocks and roots, through mud and shingle, in and out of the saddle. When I'd finished, I zipped across the parking lot and entered the harder set of technical trails, choosing, "Instant Gratification" over "Catalyst".

I chose it because the last part of the loop takes you back over the river, and a new bridge/obstacle has been built over it. I'll have to get some pics of the obstacles so you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, you climb in a gigantic wiggly clockwise circle for about two kilometres. It's not even though - there are dips, dog-legs, bridges, planks, stumps, concrete lumps, roots, off-camber sections, and water obstacles to navigate. All this and it's overgrown because of the rain and brilliant sunshine we've been having. It's taxing, and there were a couple of uphill switchback bends I couldn't take without having to put a foot down. Or two.

The top gets you above the tree line, and a construction site becomes apparent on your left as you break through into relatively open space. The trail gets much sandier - there's no tree cover or mulch to protect the soil there. Someone has built a couple of jumps out of wood, and with a couple of bends you're at the peak. I took the right hand trail, which takes you along the top of a ridge for a while, until a brisk, technical, and challenging descent.

The perplexing thing is that I've ridden this section before. With some aplomb, I might add. Yesterday my mind was distracted as my bike turned downwards like a submarine seeking depth. I picked up speed quickly, and the ground was dusty and rooty so it wasn't long before the back wheel was locked up in a permanent, writhing, jerking skid. I was OK at that point. Usually though, a lock-up means an eventual slow-down. In this case I picked up speed. Five or six seconds later I still hadn't arrested any momentum and a switchback right-hander was coming up. It followed the ridge too, so a straight line from where I was going actually ran out of ridge to ride on.

This is when one might most appreciate dual suspension. The back end was jerking around and, try as I might, I couldn't absorb all of its spasms with my legs so my vision began to blur with the violent juddering of the bike as the bend rushed towards me. By the time I'd realised I really had to lean the front wheel over to the right, it'd already been thrown from a root onto the left-hand lip of the ridge. By the time I realised I was still going too fast for my ability to cope with such a severe turn, I was at the point of no return. There was no longer any point in trying to actually ride the bike - it became about damage limitation.

The hard, dusty rubber of the tyre sank purposefully into the soft earth on the lip of the trail, and no turning of the handlebars made any difference. The front end of the bike twisted like a spatula in cake mix. Five centimetres further was a 20% gradient downward slope for twenty metres to another, lower trail. In-between were dozens of slim trees, overhanging branches, leaves and mulchy, muddy forest slope. The bike began to soar over the lip as, still with my feet clipped into the pedals, I grabbed at a two-inch thick, green branch slightly above my head.

I can't tell you exactly what happened next. For some of the time my eyes were closed, and it all happened very quickly. Suffice to say, the branch snapped in my hands but the arresting force was enough to peel me off the back of the bike, and my feet from the pedals. I must have travelled through a bit of dense undergrowth because - some time later - I noticed the various wounds I'd received. A deep scratch to the back of my right knee, that filled the pit of my leg there with sticky bloodstain. An impressive, 12cm gash was carved into my left thigh like scraping a tent peg through wet mud. Not very deep though. Oh - and as a friend attested to the next day over dinner, three large patches of road rash on my back and two more circa 4cm gashes to my ribs. I had a throbbing zit buried somewhere in my left eyebrow too, but I had that before.

My bike landed but I flew for another four feet or so, and I'm grateful for that. While the smaller branches did graze me like a brillo pad as I flew through them, I still landed in the underwgrowth with soft, well-irrigated mud beneath it. If I'd have landed upon my bike it would have been a great deal more painful. There was some slipping and sliding as I tried to get back up to my bike, and even more as I dragged it by the back wheel onto the trail again. To be honest, I didn't even have the wind knocked out of me. I was sore and stiff though.

On reflection, I congratulated myself on having the foresight to realise I was beyond the point of no return, and making a grab for the branch. The fact that the branch, twice the thickness of a cable remote control, broke away wasn't something I could have predicted, and had no control over. This is an important thing to remember as someone fighting back from GAD who, in the throes of symptoms, would assume it was their fault they picked the wrong branch.

I shit you not.

I got straight back on the bike too, though the rest of the trail was still a less-steep but just as technical downhill through more switchbacks and ultimately to the river obstacle which, regrettably, I ended up walking the bike over even though I have ridden it before.

But I did carry on riding.

To be continued...