my first accident

Monday August 4, 2008
Fremont – Sioux city IA 144k
Elevation gain
Elevation loss
Net loss
Time 7.03
Maximum speed: 55.4k/h
Average speed; 20.5

It was a long day and I got a fairly late start because we had to come from Iowa back to Fremont which took at least 45 minutes. I got on the road about 7.30AM or maybe even seven forty-five. The wind was against us from the beginning but then about 90 minutes into the day it switched to the south as the sky cleared and the temperature rose. Then we ran into a shower which lasted a half hour or so, didn’t rain much but it was enough to put up lots of spray as the trucks came by. After the shower the wind turned to the NE and that is the way it stayed the rest of the day for about 65 miles. It made the trip a bit of a slog fest. About 2 PM we crossed the Missouri river into Iowa. It was one of those open steel grid affairs, hard to ride on, and many people walked. A hundred yards after we passed the ‘welcome to Iowa’ sign and had our picture taken I had a painful fall. The shoulders in Nebraska had been very narrow in some areas, non-existent in most. In Iowa not only was the shoulder non-existent, the drop off was between four and six inches. I had read my map at the foto shoot and after I got back on the bike I realized that I had not noted the total distance so could not figure how much I had left to go, so I reached into my handlebar bag and pulled out the map and dropped my front wheel off the pavement. The safe thing to do in those circumstances is to follow your wheel. Well, I did not attempt to pull it back up, but neither did I follow it off the road. I kicked my left foot loose and thought I could stop that way, when without warning my front wheel turned sharply to the left, yanked the handlebars out of my hand and jumped back onto the pavement. I went over the handlebars and landed on the front wheel which gave me a sucker punch. There I lay on my hands and knees on the pavement, the right leg still attached to the pedal, totally winded, and gasping for air. Thank God there was no traffic and lots of people to help. I only had a couple of scrapes but my lower ribs on the right hand side were red and sore.

After Betsy, the nurse had checked me over and suggested that I probably had only bruised them, I got back on my bike and rode into camp which was still about 55 km to go. Thankfully, Randy and Russ helped me in. They were on sweep and felt responsible I guess. They got me to draft behind them. For an hour or so it went fine and then the pain started. For a short time we drafted behind the Stehouwer boys and that really helped and we were able to maintain a 25k/h when I couldn’t keep up, either Randy or Russ would come behind me and push me along. They called it ‘laying on of hands’ and so we limped home.