Thoughts on the road

I’d be lying if I said that I was able to ride my bike yesterday without thoughts of three horrific crashes that had taken place in the previous couple of days. One was a pro rider in the Giro d’Italia, Alberto Lopez de Munain, who went out in what Velonews described as a “ghastly” high-speed crash when he touched wheels with another rider and went into a metal guardrail. It’s a sign of how bad the crash looked that the initial reports indicated with some relief that he had only broken some ribs and his collarbone and had collapsed a lung. The picture is too disturbing to post — a body shouldn’t look like that.

Then there was a cyclist killed in NYC on Sunday, a young waitress who biked between Manhattan and her apartment in Williamsburg, hit by a garbage truck whose driver never even knew he’d touched her. And much closer to home, a rider with the local club, apparently a very popular and well-known fellow who owned a restaurant in Guilderland, died in a crash when he had a blow-out going down a steep hill. He was helmeted, but sometimes that just won’t be enough, and if you blow out, bad things are going to happen.

So yes, on last night’s ride home from work (which I stretched by running out to Best and Luther and then back), there was just a touch of nervousness and worry, and I did stop and pump up my tires a little when I thought they were just a tad soft for the conditions. I’m never going to go out by touching wheels with another rider, but cars and trucks are a constant threat (cellphone and youth being extreme multiplying factors), and a blow-out could happen to anyone. I stopped riding for nearly twenty years because I had had a couple of bad accidents — one in traffic, down on gravel on a busy, dangerous road where I could easily have been run over, and another in a safer location where I went right over the handlebars and onto my back, which left me with a concussion and shock that lasted for several days. Those were when I was about 21, and helmets were pretty much unheard of, but they kinda put me off bicycling for a very very long time. When I got back into it just a few years ago, I was originally unsure if I would ever be comfortable in traffic again, but it’s just like riding a bicycle, as it turns out, and while I don’t love it, it doesn’t exactly scare me, either. I guess all one can do is be as safe as it’s possible to be (I ride pretty conservatively), keep eyes and ears open (I never ride with music), be ready for anything, and be prepared to chase down and kill a’holes who throw bottles out car windows.
Tomorrow, I ride again.