Was riding my usual route to work this morning, which includes a four mile stretch on a MUP that lets me take a more direct route across town and avoid some busy streets. Usually things are pretty quiet on the path in the mornings. This morning, at about the halfway point on my commute I started seeing lots of riders coming from the other direction. I was later to learn that they are on a coast-to-coast bicycle trip and had about 2000 miles logged so far.

There were about 100 of them. I successfully went by 99. One guy wasn't paying attention and pulled out into my "lane" to talk to his buddy. I started yelling, "Heads up!" and hit the brakes hard. It looked like he was going to swerve back onto his side of the path, so still squeezing down on my brakes I made a split second decision to maintain my line rather than riding off the pavement and into the trees. In retrospect, this was the wrong choice.

I anticipated incorrectly and he didn't swerve back. We collided head-on. After the impact of hitting each other, we both went down. My head, left jaw, neck, left shoulder and left knee took the brunt of the impacts. Thankfully my helmet absorbed quite a bit of the blow. I was pretty disoriented for a couple minutes and may have said some rather angry things about him learning how to stay on his side of the road and paying attention.

The part of the group that witnessed the crash stopped and made sure I was OK. One of the guys was a doctor and gave me a quick concussion check, which he said I passed. Thankfully the other guy was relatively uninjured too. I'm a clyde and he said he felt like he took a good shot from a linebacker. We hit hard enough that it threw my headlight into the trees which one of the other people in his group retrieved for me.

After about five minutes of regaining our bearings and checking out the bikes, we resumed our respective journeys. I'm pretty bruised up but amazingly don't have any road rash at all. I have a feeling most of my forward momentum was spent from braking and after we hit each other I didn't slide very far.

Just this weekend I was thinking about how I hadn't gone down on my bike in years. I guess if I had to hit someone I should be glad it wasn't a car. Amazing how fast it all happened.