When I was 18 there was a busy two-lane road that I often traveled on my way to another nearby city. At one point some railroad tracks crossed the road at an angle, right in the middle of a curve. This meant that there was a short section where the tracks ran nearly parallel to the road, making it impossible to cross them at anything approaching a right angle (unless you wanted to run across the road straight into the oncoming traffic).

One day I was sailing along at a pretty good clip when I came to that curve. The smart thing would have been to slow way, way down, or even walk the bike across the tracks. But I had ridden over them many times in the past and gotten complacent. You can guess what happened next. The front wheel dropped into the slot in the pavement next to one of the tracks and down I went, into the roadway. The car behind me couldn't swerve around me because there wasn't enough shoulder on the right and there was too much oncoming traffic on the left, so the driver had to slam on his brakes. I was lying on my left side, the bike between my legs, still clipped in, listening to screeching tires and wondering if I was going to be run over.

He stopped in time, which was good because there was no way I could get up for several minutes. My left elbow had taken most of the force of the fall and my whole left arm was in agony. I couldn't use it to push myself up off the ground so I had to sort of slither out from under the bike and roll over to use my right arm to get up. The concerned driver wanted to take me to a hospital, but I just wanted to get out of there with what was left of my pride and go home. Surprisingly, the only damage to the bike I could see was some shredded handlebar tape and the bars themselves were no longer facing the same way as the (undamaged) front wheel. I stood with the wheel between my legs and yanked with my good arm until the bars and the wheel were more-or-less aligned properly and then I rode home. My left elbow was locked tight with my arm bent upward across my chest, so I had to ride home about ten miles with just my right hand to steer and operate one brake.

This accident actually led to another embarrassing moment: The doctor told me to keep my left arm in a sling for a couple of weeks until the elbow was completely healed. I took it out of the sling a few days early, and that very day I absent-mindedly leaned on that arm as I was climbing into a friend's van. My arm buckled under me and I fell face-first into the van (in front of everyone, of course); my elbow locked up again and I had to spend another two weeks in that sling.