Originally Posted by
Brian Ratliff
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Side note: I thought this was a bit high, but at $350/mo, it'll take 24 years of riding to offset a $100k hospital visit (easily the price for an ambulance, ER, doctors, a few days in a bed, and recovery from a bad head injury). I'd say this is actually a fairly good estimate. I would expect catastrophic accidents happen at about this rate (100k miles is a bit more than 4000 miles/year for those 24 years) on average.
To expand...
The cost of the same accident wearing a helmet might be about $4000 - the cost of a self-transported ER visit, a couple hours under observation, 20 minutes with a doctor and a CT scan (about the cost to insurance of my last velodrome crash). Over 24 years of riding, this comes to about $14/mo. Net cost to society might then be estimated at roughly $335/mo per individual for choosing to consistently go helmet-less.
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"If you’re new enough [to racing] that you would ask such question, then i would hazard a guess that if you just made up a workout that sounded hard to do, and did it, you’d probably get faster." --
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