Smack
A Jeep Cherokee tried to take a piece out of me on my ride this morning. Fortunately it only sideswiped me, leaving me bruised and scratched but, so far as I know, with nothing broken. My upper arm and elbow are pretty sore where they smashed his right rear-view mirror, and my hip is sore where his rear tirewell hit me.
I was in the middle of the lane signaling a left turn for about 50 yards. The guy had 1/4-mile visibility to see me. But he somehow didn't think that I was actually going to turn left and decided to try and pass me at 50mph. Winner of a driver there.
The bike came out of it a little worse for wear. Both shifters are pretty scratched up, along with the pedals, the rear D, the saddle and the bars. Damage is a lot like my crash at Ace a year and a half ago, only more so. Oh, and my new iBike powermeter is now iBroke. Riding the 5 miles home (yeah, I rode home, stupid) the bike seemed to be pulling to the left. I don't see any visible damage to the frame, but it might be bent. Shifting was all horked up too. Strangely, my wheels are fine. Rock on Open Pros.
It's all now in the hands of the insurance companies. The patrolman who reported cited the guy for "an improper turn."
Hug your loved ones for me. Josie can't figure out why I'm being such a pest.
I was in the middle of the lane signaling a left turn for about 50 yards. The guy had 1/4-mile visibility to see me. But he somehow didn't think that I was actually going to turn left and decided to try and pass me at 50mph. Winner of a driver there.
The bike came out of it a little worse for wear. Both shifters are pretty scratched up, along with the pedals, the rear D, the saddle and the bars. Damage is a lot like my crash at Ace a year and a half ago, only more so. Oh, and my new iBike powermeter is now iBroke. Riding the 5 miles home (yeah, I rode home, stupid) the bike seemed to be pulling to the left. I don't see any visible damage to the frame, but it might be bent. Shifting was all horked up too. Strangely, my wheels are fine. Rock on Open Pros.
It's all now in the hands of the insurance companies. The patrolman who reported cited the guy for "an improper turn."
Hug your loved ones for me. Josie can't figure out why I'm being such a pest.
posted by curveship at 11:03 AM
2 Comments:
Ouch! Methinks that you should avoid all sudden encounters with large, quickly-moving metal objects.
This is your first hit, isn't it? Glad to hear that it wasn't worse. Really, you sound like you were able to avoid the worst of it. Was the driver obnoxious? Did he take the blame for what happened, or was he aggressive. At least he stopped, I suppose.
Especially sorry to hear about the iBike, since I know that was your latest toy. Do they have any sort of crash replacement program? It seems like often those kinds of companies are willing to cut you some sort of deal.
Cars are hard. I ride out on errands now and look at front bumpers and think, ouch. From races and group rides, I'd gotten a little cocky about my ability to keep the bike upright with bikes and bodies bumping into me. But none of that stuff works with a car. It comes at you, it's not stopping or bouncing away.
I'm still pretty spooked -- if a car is coming up to a stopsign on a road where I don't have a stop, I still slow way down until I can tell the driver is going to wait for me.
The driver of the SUV was honest, stopped right away and came back. He said when he looked in his rear view mirror, he thought he had killed me. The first thing I said to him was "That's a LEFT TURN SIGNAL," holding out my left hand. He said "I thought you meant you were stopping!" At the time, I understood him to mean he thought I was giving the bent-armed stop signal. After thinking about it, I think he meant that he didn't know what a left turn signal was.
It took a while -- days really, and it's still going on -- for it all to sink in. Right after the accident, I had the mentality that this was basically a sports injury like others I've encountered. Like, say, I'd had a wreck at a race. I figured, crap, bike's scratched up, I'll go home and ice my bruises and limp around for a while. But the more I thought about it, the more I had to deal with a doctor's visit and insurance and all that, the more I realized that in the bell curve of things that can happen when a 50mph SUV meets a 20mph cyclist, I ended up way way way on the lucky end of the curve.
So far, the only thing I've done with the iBike was download the ride file -- yep, even though the case is cracked off, the circuit board was intact, along with the download connector. It's a little eerie to look at the file. There's my speed, slowing from about 25mph to 20mph for the turn, then it ramps down to 0 over about 20 seconds -- from the wheel of my bike spinning in the air on the side of the road.
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