The Saturday Ass Over Elbows Edition

Ouch... Yesterday Brian and I finally made it up to the Avalon area of Patapsco for some riding. We'd planned to head out to the Leesburg Bakers Dozen course but with rain on the way and a 1+ hour drive to get there I suggested we forget about that idea. Turns out we probably made the right choice. We finished up our ride just as the rain started to fall as it was.

The Avalon trails have been basically out of commission for a while from the precip and freeze thaw cycles so we'd been waiting to get up there. It was Brian's first time ever riding there and my first time in at least a year or maybe 2 aside from a short night ride before last year's Baker's Dozen. Riding smooth, relatively flat and easy trails like Rosey and Fairland lately it was really good to get out to the more technical and hilly Avalon system.

My face scrapped something on impact and something sliced through my ear a bit as well.

We parked in the Park'n Ride on 195 and dropped in to the park. The decent was super fast and I was feeling great on the bike. Just before we got to the small lot and tot lot area before the first climb of the day I noticed a large and jumpable looking rock along the side of the trail. I went back and told Brian I was going to try and jump it. Bad idea.

The helmet obviously took a solid hit for me.

I jumped it though as I was doing so knew I shouldn't be. The rock had a steeper face then I realized so I went up hard and the front wheel came down fast. It planted with the rest of the bike still in the vertical position I went over the handle bars cracked my head off a log or something and landed flat on my back on top of said log. By far my hardest crash in a long time, maybe even ever, and I have the broken helmet to prove it. Damn.

A couple of spots showing the helmet did it's job.

Since it was within the first 10 minutes of the ride that this happened, once I shook the cobwebs out of my head and determined I wasn't badly injured I decided to go on. Brian obliged and we ended up getting a great 2+ hour ride in on surprisingly rut free and hard packed, and dry trails. Despite the crash I wasn't overly cautious which surprised me, at least until our final descent down a particularly tight, twisty and rocky/rooty trail.

Once I got all the dried blood cleaned up and the cut to stop bleeding it really doesn't look all that bad. You can sort of see the start of the cut there on the front of the ear.

Today, well I'll just say I feel it. The back, neck and shoulders are pretty sore, though still not quite as bad as I expected. The 800 mg Ibuprofen and Vicadin knock off medicine I've got left over from my wisdom teeth extraction likely have something to do with that though. The way I work I'll probably be worse off tomorrow; my soreness is always on a two day delay. In the mean time I need to look into getting a new helmet soon; a fellow rider out there yesterday reminded me about the Rockburn race coming up this weekend which I'm signed up for.

Unfortunately I didn't actually take any good shots during the ride so the focus of this posts images is of course my wreck. I guess the post itself is a little crash centric as well. Ah well, it's just been a while since I got to talk about how badly I tried to hurt myself I guess.