Commuting - Crashed after a long day

So I was having a great day starting with an extended commute to work this morning that was about 20 miles. I even took pictures of various parts and was in an excellent mood.

I got out of work really early and decided to go for a long ride home. 30ish miles later, I got home still feeling great (it's not often I ride 50 miles/day). A couple hours later, I rode to play softball and even though we lost, I was still in good spirits because I was going to finish the day with 65 miles under me (highest daily total so far).

So anyway, I'm riding home, cruising along and it started to rain. No big deal, I ride in the rain all the time. I'm going down a nice hill, just leaving downtown and go to shift into my big chainring when the next thing I know I have no tension in the pedals. I look down, see my chain all tangled up and then next thing I know I'm sideways on the conrete curb/sidewalk. I'm not sure if the chain tangled up is what took me down or if my right pedal struck the curb, lifting my rear wheel off the ground and caused the crash. As soon as I lost tension, I started moving to the right, so it's possible I got too close to the curb and this is what happened.

Either way, I'm hurting pretty good with some pretty nasty rash shoulder to wrist. I didn't have my gloves on but I got lucky and my hands were not injured. Lost some significant skin on my right knee and pretty bruised throughout.

Still, I managed to put the bike back together and make it the rest of the way home. I tell ya...why did this have to happen on such a good bike day? :o

Mmmm...let me guess... Murphy?

Ricardo

Ouch! Sometimes bad luck's just waiting behind a tree waiting for someone to jump. Glad to hear your bike's ok. Heal up and feel better soon!

Ouch! Sometimes bad luck's just waiting behind a tree waiting for someone to jump. Glad to hear your bike's ok. Heal up and feel better soon!
Thanks...although I had blood everywhere when I got home (to my wife's dismay), I cleaned up pretty well.

Speaking of the wife, she was a little annoyed by the fact that I told her that I took 10 minutes to make sure the bike was going to be fine (minus a few scratches here and there) and even hopped back on for a 100 yards or so for a test-run before I realized I was bleeding and cut pretty badly.

The biggest casualty of the whole event seems to be my brand new egg beater S pedal. The right pedal got pretty scraped up although I think it's just cosmetic. Grr...

Glad you're ok... soo.. about the bike.
Any idea what exactly happened? Chain fell off?

Well, when I looked down, the chain was around the crank, all twisted around. I started to downshift and try to pull it back onto the biggest chainring, when immediately I was on the ground. It all happened so quickly,

I'm not sure if my front derailleur needed adjusting before the crash, but it definately needs it now...which could have been what sent the chain over onto the crank. Now as to why I fell, I'm not sure. Either the chain got tangled worse as I was trying to fix, or I wandered too close to the curb while trying to straighten things out and was eaten by pedal-strike.

It all happened pretty fast. What shocks me the most is that there had to have been cars that saw me go down, but no one stopped to check to see if I was ok. I did pop up and was on my feet almost immediately after I went down, so maybe that was it.

Either that or they couldn't control their laughter and didn't want to embarass me further. ;)

man. that sucks. glad to hear you and your bike are ok. I've had my chain shift off the front derailleur before due to bad limit settings. Didn't crash because the rear wheel was freewheeling ok, so I could coast and brake to stop. the worst part was that it snuck by that little knob that's supposed to prevent the chain from wedging in the cranks. Took me forever to figure out how it happened (and to get it out). Apparently, there was just enough room between that knob and my chainring for the inner links to pass through. I sat there on the side of the road fighting with my chain for like 5 minutes before I figured that out!

I'm not surprised about the cars, but still a little disappointed in humanity... I heard a statistic that 50% of all car-bike crashes here in Austin are hit and runs. I don't remember where I heard that though. Then again 87% of all statistics are made up on the spot so it doesn't really matter.