Christmas trips and falls

Tuesday 23 December 2008

Christmas trips and falls

What does;

+ 2 Degrees outsie

+ An Ice covered bike trail

+ No Gloves

+ No Winter cycling kit

+ No Puncture repair kit

+ No Helmet

make for? A whole lot of fun and a few cuts and bruises :)

Ok so I decided after 5 days at home and quite a few run and swim sessions I'd head out on my mtb for a few hours in the cold.

First mistake was leaving all my cycling kit in Vancouver. This left only some (purely summer) Kiwami tri shorts to wear leaving my legs pretty exposed, luckily I had my running stuff so my upper half was relatively warm.

Second mistake was forgetting my gloves. I had actually looked them out in the house but was about 300m down the road when I realised I had left them in the kitchen... so listening to my man instinct of "never turn back for anything you left behind under any circumstances" I continued into the cold... bare white knuckles.

Due to the first two mistakes this meant I had to improvise in order to keep warm, so from about km 10 onward I had to ride with one hand on the bars and one hand neatly tucked down the side of my skin tight blue tri shorts ... (this started to get a few stares).

Now under normal conditions my mtb handling skills are questionable at best but today, in the ice, one hand down my shorts, struggling to maintain core temperature and losing basic motor skills ... they were crap.

This lead to increased weaving ... more so than usual ... which lead to a high number of violent swerves, usually toward something, like a parked tractor, fence post or cow. After maybe my 10th swerve I ended up aiming straight toward the only hole within 100 miles and ploughing straight into it, PUNCTURE. yay

Of course I had also left all my puncture repair stuff in Vancouver also. So now I was stuck, 15 km from home, in spandex, no gloves and my face had started to do that thing where your bottom lip and jaw become limp and you look like a fish. Well a sensible person, with a healthy body temperature and feeling in their brain, would have called their sister to come pick them up... but I decided it would be much more fun to ride all the way home on the rim. Well If my handling skills were bad before now they were terrible, the bike had a nice little mind of its own and coupled with my hands - which were now bright red - they started to try and hurl me into bushes and fences etc.

I guess I got about 5 km from home before I successfully managed to drive into a ditch, fall over sideways and of course hit my head. But to be honest by this time I had given up. I did however, continue to ride home on the rim and stop to take some pictures of the dark Scottish afternoons. I've put them all below...

I forgot how many sheep there were in Scotland...