TLit

Yesterday toward the end of day I headed out for a short bike ride and "constitutional" walk at a park and took a tumble on to the road because the driveway abutting it had a piece of debris on it that I hit. I'm riding a standard 1980s 12 speed Centurion 68cm bike. I held on to the bike as I took the fall, bruising my left outer lower hand and my right arm below elbow which was worse, several inches of a bruised scrape. I was wearing a short sleeve shirt. Definitely painful and jarring and unexpected. I'd normally expect the bike wheel to ride over small impediments. I'm posting this partly as a query on how to avoid falls in the future as well as to help others avoid them. I'll post pictures when I get a chance. The front bike tire will need to be trued, I'm hoping it was not permanently damaged.

Jeff Neese

Your story is light on details so it's hard to give you any usable advice.

For starters, just what was this "piece of debris"? If it was big enough to cause a crash, it must have been big enough to see. Anything that's small enough that you don't see until the last minute is probably not going to cause a crash. Did you see this debri?

livedarklions

I have mild color blindness, and one of the biggest problems I have is that objects on the road are harder for me to see than for people with normal vision. There's no good way to be ready for this, just slow down if you're in an area with lots of debris. I suspect I put in a lot more effort than normal scanning the road surface ahead of me, but I can't get inside of other people's heads to know.

indyfabz

Please don’t post graphic photos of your injuries. They are frowned upon here.

Even a relatively small piece of stone, etc., angled just right can take out a front wheel. Let’s hope it was an isolated incident and not the start of a trend.

How is your vision these days?

50PlusCycling

68cm bike? How long did it take you to hit the ground?

I ride daily at the nearby parks, the bike paths are sheltered by trees, I always watch the ground carefully on my first lap because fallen twigs and sticks are frequent obstacles, and in the curvy parts they have caused a few falls.

DeadGrandpa

If you really want to Prevent Falls from happening, you must avoid hitting those objects on the road which will deflect the front wheel. Wider tires run at lower pressure will help but not guarantee success. If you absolutely, positively, cannot afford to risk a fall for any reason, you need to ride a recumbent trike. As long as you ride the two wheeled variety of bikes, you are at risk for a fall and crash against the ground. Gravity always wins.

Troul 

i look for falls, but they seem to be less obvious when looking for them.
cant say the same for cars & buses.

noimagination

If the debris you hit kicked your front wheel laterally enough so that your center of gravity was not over your wheels, or if the change in your momentum caused your body weight to shift so that your center of gravity was not over your wheels, and if you couldn't correct (i.e. shift your weight or turn you bars) in time to get your wheels back under you, you would go down.

Sometimes a rider can instinctively act to recover from something like this, but it depends on the magnitude of the deviation from center of gravity, where your body weight at that instant is and how quickly you react - it happens far too quickly for cogitation, you have to react instantly/instinctively. That comes from miles/hours of riding in many types of conditions. Also you can improve your form on the bike - being loose and relaxed with a significant portion of your weight supported by your legs instead of planted on your seat and your hands and your grip on the bar firm but not strangling it. This can help you to react more quickly in an emergency situation.

Keeping mentally alert and tracking road and traffic conditions so that you can anticipate problems is the best means of prevention.

Koyote

Seems like you handled it well. Sticking out your arm, to break the fall, is more likely to result in a broken wrist, arm, or clavicle.

Speed, terrain, lighting, etc, can all make it more difficult to see even small objects.

I don't know anything about color blindness, so perhaps this doesn't work..But I am wondering if tinted sunglasses could help by providing more contrast? I always have a couple pairs, with different lenses for different conditions, to help with that...But I'm not color blind.

Bald Paul

When I rode motorcycles, I learned an expression - there are two types of riders: those that have been down, and those that will go down. You can't always predict when or how it's going to happen. I was riding on the highway when a mattress flew off the roof of the car in front of me (twine just wasn't strong enough at 70 MPH, I guess) and I had vehicles on either side of me. I just held on and rode straight over it and kept going. Another time I was making a very low speed turn, hit a small patch of sand, and found myself laying halfway under the bike.
I'm sure there are a lot of physics involved in a fall. Things like speed, lean angle, etc. Usually you won't have time to figure out all those computations in your head when you realize you've hit something in your path, and you're just along for the ride. The best you can do is to try not to hit things, I guess.

livedarklions

Generally, any tint in the sunglasses actually makes it worse. I cannot read stoplights with tinted sunglasses because it looks like all 3 lights are turned off. If I have to wear them, it has to be grey only.

There are "corrective" glasses that are supposed to heighten contrast, but they don't make them for lenses with my other prescriptions.

Small piles of leaves in the fall are ideal for disguising obstacles. Don't ask me how I know.

beng1

Hitting a stone or other small object with a road-bike front wheel is tricky and dangerous, especially if you are going fast and/or are turning at the same time. As far as falling goes, take some judo classes where part of the training is learning to be thrown and learning to hit the ground. Stunt-men do this all day long so anyone else can learn it. I have been falling for sixty years and always seem to do pretty well with it, but I am open to learning.

Koyote

And if the leaves are wet and on a corner, that's your obstacle right there. Very slippery.

TLit

I was going downhill to the side of the cone; I knocked the debris on to the sidewalk.

I'm hoping to save the wheel, mid80s Centurion.


My arm and hand are healing ok, I used Bag balm and Tea tree/Lavender oil.

79pmooney

General cycling strategies that I picked up from the veteran racers in our club when I was a novice and later that I adopted over my racing days. 1) Ride with a secure drip on the handlebars. Not a death grip but firm so when you hit that unexpected rock or pothole your hands stay on the handlebars. 2) Ride with your arms bent so they act as shock absorber. So if you hit something unexpected, again, you are prepared, And my practice to minimize damage to me in the vast majority of crashes - my mantra, "Don't let go of the handlebars until after I hit the road." That is all about not breaking bones so my race training won't be interrupted.

It sounds like you kept your hands on the handlbars. And you got off with scrapes, bruises but no broken bones. Well done. My other mantra was "Greet the road with everything I've got." That meant rotating my knee and elbow out so they both hit. (But again, not holding them rigid but just serving as a first contact and more skin.) The more and bigger the road rash patches, almost always, the less deep each one was and the faster it healed. The more "corners" of my body that hit - elbows, knees hip, ankle - the less damage to any one of them.

Now, all my racing was done long before clipless pedals. I rode with quality leather toestraps pulled tight. I also have never been a gymnast nor do i have the coordination to haver been one without breaking bones, etc. trying. So the vast majority of my crashes were slides wile firmly attached t my pedals. No rolling like a gymnast.

And last, though I learned this early on from those club veterans - anytime the going gets "iffy", be in the drops! With hands in the drops of a racing handlebar, the firm but not rigid grip, elbows out and bent, you are set for just about anything. Being bumped by another rider. Hitting the deep pothole that just appeared from under the rider in front of you. The stone or loose waterbottle you didn't see. The crashin front you have to dodge. So, all my bikes get set up so the drops are a place I can hang out comfortably and I go there a lot. (Not only are the drops nice and comfortable; if you do loose your grip, the curve of the drop is still in the crotch of your hand; between index and thumb. If you slide forward on the brake hoods, there's nothing there. Now, back in the days of the dinosaurs, the brake hoods were a far less inviting place to put your hands and we had those dang brake cables to deal with ... but - the big "but" no one talks about - if your hand did get knocked off the lever, that same crotch in your hand got a rude awakening when it hit that cable housing.. Rude - yes. Painful - yes. But - your hand was still on the handlebar and you didn't crash. And we all did that at least once. That's a lot of crashes that didn't happen.

Edit - the OP's bike is a dinosaur era bike. Those brake cables! The curse and blessing!

terrymorse 

You often can recover from a sliding wheel by taking advantage of a bike's natural ability to be stable when going straight.

If you're going straight and the wheel skips to the side, just relax and wait for the bike to return to rolling straight ahead.

If you're in a turn when the wheel slides, instantly turn the bars in the direction of the slide. This will stop the slide, get the wheel tracking again, and it will open the radius of the turn. Once you regain control, you can continue your turn. The trick is reacting quickly enough to the slide.

79pmooney

Your wheel - best fixed by an old mechanic who was doing it 40 years ago because your rim is almost certainly bent. Common in the old, pre- modern higher strength aluminums common for bicycle rims. THe standard practice then for getting that rim "right", straight and very close to true was a practice heavily frowned on now by mechanics, shop owners and lawyers. Loosen the spokes around the bent, then slam that area of the wheel hard on a concrete step or the like to bend it back straight. (Rim never quite goes back perfect. The beginning and end of the bent stretch will have work hardened and resist going back to it's previous. But a skilled mechanic can get the overall shape so close the wheel will roll and brake just fine. And to the whole operation in 10 minutes. (Our mechanic used to tell the customer 4 hours - just to get him out of the shop and do with with no one but us employees watching!)

This practice is riskier with the rims after yours with the new alloys. Far stronger, less "mild" and doesn't take to being bent and re-bent nearly as well. Modern mechanics will either not touch your rim or want to adjust spokes to correct the true. If your rim is indeed bent, that means unequal tensions on the spokes to force the rim to run straight. Such a wheel will never be a "happy" wheel and very likely be an ongoing problem. So look for that old mechanic. And if he refuses to let you watch him - well I think you just found one of the good ones!

terrymorse 

Yes, I can attest to this technique for straightening aluminum (and steel!) rims.

My dad's truing workbench had a 2x4 mounted with spacers to leave a gap about the width of a rim. He would insert the bent part of the rim and push down on the wheel. Loosening the spokes too much would make the rim "noodly" though, making it hard to isolate the bent section. After watching him and practicing on my own, I was able to bend back a bent rim to roughly straight, then true the wheel with spoke tension.

Other mechanics would lay the wheel on the ground and step on it. That always seemed pretty crude to me.

TLit

I dropped the wheel off at a shop this morning who spoke fondly of the Centurion bikes, he didn't say how he would do it but hopefully by end of week. $35.

livedarklions

Stuntmen can do this all day because the falls are planned. Judo likewise has nothing similar to the unexpected fall from a bike. I'm in my early 60s, and I've taken my share of falls. Never had a judo lesson in my life, and I likewise "seem to do pretty well with it." These anecdotes prove nothing.

Jeff Neese

Now that we've seen pictures, one piece of advice that comes to mind is to slow down and ride carefully when you see orange cones.

drlogik 

TLit,

Ahhhh, you may have rolled over one of those marble-sized stones just right to cause the tire to grip it and roll sideways. I've done that a couple of times. Scary as heck and just comes out of nowhere. Imagine jogging along on a sidewalk and you don't see a rolling pin sitting on the sidewalk and you step on it. Shwing!! I think that's what the tire does.

The last time was a couple of weeks ago for me. Same sizes stones at a corner and took the corner and the tire rolled over the stone just right to make the tire roll left suddenly which jarred the handlebars but I was hanging on and caught it.

Sounds like you handled it pretty well. Keep those eyes peeled!

indyfabz

If you rode through that fresh patch, your front wheel might have sunk in and turned abruptly, causing the fall.

I fell over last summer riding a loaded touring bike on a sand road in NJ blueberry country. I was only going about 5 mph and pedaling lightly. Front wheel hit a soft spot, sunk in and turned to the right. I came to a complete stop and fell over. Only thing injured was my pride, even though there was no one around to see it.

TLit

With the barage of daily stimuli it is hard to differentiate significant signs from accidental ones. I spoke the handiman in the housing complex today and he said there was construction around there last week. A cone that is left behind but has no clear active significance vs. a sign in ongoing work or construction, big difference there.

TLit

I've gone over 30 years without a significant fall. Last time I remember was with a group at Mt. Snow Vermont where we had a bike, run, ski group, it was toward the end of winter and I slipped on a patch of ice. The worst one I remember was going down Rich Somerby's driveway in my early teens where I could not break in time and wiped out the side of my face and never had an even smile after that.