Oh Shit!

 

Brian was cycling down the road on a balmy 90 degree humid day when most 78 year olds were sitting in their air conditioned homes. He was going along the 12 and climbed the hill before the White Stone Gravel pit near Waterville NY. He crested the hill and began his descent. He dropped down into the drops of his handlebars into a semi aerodynamic position. Brian could get famously low on his bike to let the air flow pass over him and increase his speed. Suddenly the bicycle gave way beneath him. He said “OH SHIT!” and he landed several feet away from the road in a grassy ditch. Brian estimates that he was traveling about 30 miles per hour. A passerby must have witnessed the fall or come across him laying in the ditch and called 911. It must have been a spectacular crash because we estimate from the damage he hit the ground at 30 MPH. His shattered helmet verifies the intensity of the impact to his head and spine.  His bike lay in two pieces the fork and front tire and the rest. The handlebars loose in the head stem. Catastrophic steering failure in the fork. The carbon fiber stressed over the last 20 years had given way and there was no pulling out of this one. He went down hard. He remembers the fall but details are murky. Was it rumble strip then fork failure or fork failure then rumble strip? We may never know. The police came, and paramedics, then it was lights and sirens, 78 MPH, to St. Elizabeth Trauma center in Utica where Jean was already on the way. Life 360 showed the speed of the ambulance to be 78 miles per hour on a one lane two way road for the “little accident.”