This thread is great, really a welcome relief from all the threads where people give insanely high average speeds, that just make me feel like I'm weak.

Personally:

1. Ran out of steam on my first triathlon practice sprint (I never knew how quickly energy is depleted when sprinting on a bike. Was stuffed within 20 seconds.

2. Got dropped at 30km on my old 10-speed bike. Actually, I'm pretty proud of this because they were all riding new roadies, and I kept up 31km/hr for a whole hour, that was a big achievement for me.

I coasted uphill to stop for a red light, failed to unclip & fell over at the feet of a couple of pan-handlers. one quipped "I hate it when that happens!"

That reminds me of one when I was about 10. I was chasing a neighbor kid around on my bike waving a stick at him and managed to stick it through the spokes of my front wheel. Flipped the bike right over on top of me. Fortunately it was on gravel, not pavement.

When I started regular riding a year ago, I began getting back in shape by first using a very heavy electric bike. One day I was stopped, feet on the ground and all, at a stoplight waiting for the walk signal when the bike tilted to the left, and knocked me onto the ground just with its sheer weight. I mean, I was OFF the bike, not clipped in, and it STILL knocked me over. Left the watching drivers really nonplussed, I expect: "What happened to her?" "Dunno--she was just standing there and then she just fell right over!"

Switching to a normal road bike this winter felt like switching from driving a semi to flying a light plane! I do still have the ability to fall over from leaning onto my clipped-in side, though---did it a couple of weeks ago.

So, did you ever perfect it?

Let's preface my story by saying I am, without a doubt, an idiot. So my wife and I are at Wal-Mart picking up one of those cheapie Next brand mountain bikes for her so she can see if she even likes to ride a bike w/o wasting too much money. Now, I am 6'6" and my wife is 5'1" so we look like a couple of freaks standing next to each other. Anyway, this obviously necessitates her getting a child sized bike compared to my gangly frame. On our way out of the store, its a typical Wal-Mart day. An ocean of cars in the parking lot with a good 50 people entering or exiting the store at any given time. You see where this is going.... So I have the bright idea to ride my wife's pimpin' bike back to the car since I was tired of leaning way over and pushing it around. So I get on the bike and begin to pedal and I look like one of those bears that ride a bicycle at the circus. My long legs have no business on this bike and I have to stand to even be able to pedal. So I am cruising along, enjoying myself looking like a moron, and oblivious to the casual glances from the throng of shoppers waiting to plunk down their $2 for some item imported from China that costs $5 anywhere else. As I arrive at our car, I lightly apply the front brake as I am used to doing on my road bike. Well, that front brake clamps down like Norm Abram from New Yankee Workshop building a butcher block table. The bike goes from about 8 to 0 mph in less than a tenth of a second and my weight rapidly shifts forward. Did I mention I was wearing flip flops? So I do the only thing I could think of in such a situation, I yell out "Oh *****". Of course, this turned out to be a poor idea as it only served to get the attention of my fellow Wal-Mart shoppers just in time for every single person to witness me fly over the handlebars of this tiny almost-midget bike. For some reason I grasp onto the handlebars as I flip so the bike comes along for the ride and lands directly on top of me, thus bringing my humiliation (quite literally) full circle. So there I lay in the parking lot with a pink bike on top of me with the front wheel spinning as if to mock me. Amazingly enough, every single Wal-Mart customer just sort of looks at me and keeps on walking. They definitely saw me crash but apparently were unfazed. Maybe this happens often at Wal-Mart, I can't be sure. Even my wife walks up to be and says, "Nice". Apparently, I was asking for it. All in all, the bike was fine, so you can release your breath. Me. I ended up with two skinned knees and the skin scraped off the knuckles of every single one of my toes. Thanks for nothing sandals. So I guess the moral of the story is don't look for sympathy in a Wal-Mart parking lot and "fit" really does matter. Peace out.

EDIT: good story, but paragraph breaks might make it easier for people to follow through.

Sorry, my original comment was rather obnoxious.

AWESOME!

lowercase text so I can sneak a caps lock post

Um, no. I was smart enough to give up a circus career that very day.

On another note, this is the funniest, best thread I've read on this forum. It's so good to know I'm not the only idiot that ever rode a bike!

We'd just gotten married a few months before and my wife expressed some concerns for my safety while on the bike. Well, I'd been riding for years before this and mere traffic no longer held any terrors for me. I assured her I was more than competent on the bike, I was infallible, a real expert. Nothing to worry about here.
It was a Saturday morning and I was suited up to do a hour or two on the road. At the time we lived on a low hill and our street ended at a rather busy cross street at the bottom of the hill. That morning we both left the house together, me on the bike, she in her car, off to do a few errands. Now, this is 1980, just before clippless pedals and I'm fully toe-clipped and strapped into old style quill pedals.
I rolled down the hill and came to the stop sign at the bottom. There's cross traffic approaching so I set up to do a nice little trackstand until it's clear to go.
My wife was just then pulling up behind me as the trackstand went bad and I wobble and splat onto the pavement.
She sees this all go down and starts laughing so hard she almost forgets to brake and ends up skidding to a stop no more than a foot from my rear wheel.

Not long after that episode, while still living in the same house, on that same little hill..... I'm climbing the last 100 yards back up my street. Same bike with clips and straps. I've been on a long (about 5 hour) ride in summer heat. I hadn't been clever enough to follow the first rule of summer riding, DRINK! now DRINK SOME MORE! Completely dehydrated, marinated in lactic acid, I get the worst quad cramps of my life, my legs literally locked straight out.
I come bouncing up the hill looking like some giant spring loaded potassium deficient dashboard Jesus. I'm howling with the pain of these really cosmic leg cramps. I can't stop because I can't reach down to unclip. I barely made it to my driveway where I was able to swing onto my front lawn and finally collapse in a howling twitching heap. All this time the lady two doors away is intently watching this while watering her roses and wondering what the hell is happening to the neighborhood.

- Fallen with clipless pedals too many times to count.
- Bonked so hard in Wilmington VT on a hill that I had to walk the rest of the way (barefoot cause of cleats. Can you say sole burn on hot asphalt)
- Slipped while clipping in (Mr testes, say hello to Mr top-tube). Happened right in Davis Square in front of a crowd.
- Can benchpress my body weight (my body weight 10 years in the future that is assuming I weigh 100 pounds less)
- I'm the only cyclist I know who has had a head on crash with another cyclist (no major injuries, bent handlebars, torn saddle)
- Dropped my water bottle going 25+ MPH and run right over it (and didn't fall!). Still cannot believe it to this day.

Apparently my uncle tried the same stand on the seat with hands high over head trick on his bike when he was a kid. Only his bike was a motorcycle. The police pulled him over doing the trick and brought him to the station and called my grandparents to pick him up.

My mother told me this story one day when I was a kid to discourage me from wanting a motorcycle. You can imagine the effectiveness of this story. Made me want one more but I never did get a motorcycle.

OMG this is without a doubt the best thread ever. I have had tears streaming down my face for 5 minutes. I've been in some mishaps as well. On one comute home, I fell 3 times. Twice for not unclipping, the old toe clips and the third time sliding through sand. All is less than 15 miles. But Damn some of us need to be followed by video cameras, Vonnage needs some new commericals.

:roflmao: :roflmao: :roflmao:

Shouldn't it be "paragraphs are your friends?"

- Warren

And for that matter, does it matter? Guy posts a hilarious story and the first thing he gets back is he should have had more paragraphs. Geesh.

Touché. Stupid grammatical error on my part, but you have to admit that a solid block of text is not easy to get through.

OMFG LMFAO! I had to catch my breath from laughing so hard. That's priceless - 'cause it sounds like something I'd have done. :D

Peter, for my part:

I turn 30 at the end of September.

I used to be 175lbs but let 18 hour work days and a PITA, hypochondriac girlfriend get in the way of my health and I got up to 255+lbs.

I've ditched the first two bits of baggage. I'm working on the weight.

Two months ago, I was averaging 8 mph and STRUGGLED to do 3 miles. (in fairness, on a 20" folding bike with knobby tires ;)

I'm about 245lbs now.
I average 16 mph and do 6 miles a day with relative ease. My limiting factor is my butt - and I have a new saddle arriving tomorrow. :D

My goal is 180lbs by Christmas and I'll go to spinning class and use rollers to keep on top of it when the mercury drops to -42 degrees.

I will never let anything get in the way of my health again and I feel no shame for being where I'm at.

Neither should you. You're out doing something! ;)

***

TV sucks. Ride your bike!

Oh yeah, I remember when I learnd to land a drop...

I was riding with a friend who was showing the local high school mountain bike club our local trail. I hadn't ridden most of it until this point, and we got to the one drop on the trail (small, but I hadn't done one before).

All the club members did it (who all happened to be girls), and then my friend looked at me and said "You have to try it, all these little girls on Wal-Mart bikes did it!"

So I went back up, got up to the right speed, hit the drop, landed fine...and then grabbed the brakes and went over the bars because everyone was standing in the middle of the trail watching.

This is my kind of thread.....

- I'm small and built like a pretzel stick; I can climb, but loose kites pass me downhill.

- Tried to inflate a tire with a cheap basketball pump in the middle of downtown Santa Fe at lunchtime.
The pump exploded! Big BANG that deafened me and nearly had everyone diving under their tables.

- Left my beard on the pavement when a loose front fender stuffed itself into the fork at 20mph.

- Drove 100 miles to a trailhead to go mountain biking, minus the front wheel of the bike.

Earlier adventures:

- 6 years old; Dad had just taken the training wheels off, and I was cruising the neighborhood feeling like
a king. Then my right pedal started to eat my shoestring, winding it up like a fishing reel. Couldn't get
my foot down, too clumsy to backpedal and stop with the side of my foot welded to the pedal
(coaster brakes). Paniced, weaved off the road, crashed on somebody's front lawn. Couldn't
reach my foot to free it, and thought I'd by lying there, stuck to the bike forever. Fortunately,
a wonderful old lady appeared from somewhere, unwound me, dried my tears, and sent me off.

- 9 years old: 50lb. kid + Schwinn Stingray + high speed = death wobble. Lost a lot of skin. :p

heeheeheehee.

Well, my second road race I was ever in as a Freshman in High School (spring 1990), I lost the peleton early on in a 35 mile race (on the flats of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas) and ended up getting lost!

Fell last week because I unclipped the left but leaned right :eek:, empty intersection though

Two weeks ago, on the MTB trails, saw a huge patch of sand at the bottom of a drop and for some reason went straight for the brakes. Unfortunately, I didn't let go of the brakes before I hit the sand and ended up landing on my side right on top of a small stump. :eek:

Oh man, that just jogged loose a memory for me! When I was about 12, my family was visiting my grandparents out in California. We kids and our cousins were goofing around with some old bikes one of my uncles had dredged up from somewhere, and I, as one of the "big kids" had the privilege of a vintage English 3-speed. It was a crazy lot faster than my little 20" Huffy back home! I was having Very Big Fun, racing my cousin Jennifer up and down the block, right up until the point where I forgot about having hand brakes, and started backpedalling to try to lock up the coaster brake and plowed into a palm tree (one of those ones that has the bristly dead fronds all the way down to the ground) at probably about 12mph. Lucky me, I just got bruises on my thighs with a U-shape from the swoopy-shaped handlebars, plus little papercuts all over me from the palm fronds. Didn't damage that old bike at all!

Humble moments...

When I was in high school I used to race mountainbikes. I raced on an a 1980's era diamond back mountain bike complete with the chrome bull-moose style handlebars. Towards the beginning of the race the trail was very narrow, with two small trees on either side of it. My handlebars, it turns out, were wider than the trees in question, so I went flying over the bars and landed 2 feet from a 100+ foot drop into an old quarry.

I had just got a new bike. On my way home from school I was riding down this sidewalk, and heard a noise coming from the drive train. I looked down to try and see what was making it. As I was looking down, A low hanging tree branch hit me in the head, continued down my face giving me a black eye, busting both lips, and knocking me out. I regained conciousness to find a guy in a car asking if I was all right. I said I was, hopped on the bike, and rode home... The worst thing was that I had to march in the Homecoming parade that afternoon.

Here's my dumbest stuff:

- While in college (many moons ago), fell in front of half the student body (I believe it was mostly the female half) while riding a ten speed home. The wheel got on some uneven pavement and *bam*, down I went. I was hurting, but jumped up, said I was okay and then biked out of sight until I couldn't take the pain anymore. Only mnor cuts, bruises and scrapes.

- Before that, in High School (even more moons ago), I was riding bikes with a girlfriend and she asked me to take her hand and sling her around a turn (ala Roller Derby style, for you folks that can remember Roller Derby). There must be some technique that I wasn't familar with, because it didn't work too well. I went down hard, but somehow my girlfriend didn't. We were close to her house, so her and her mother patched me up and kind of threw me out of the house, because her father was on his way home and didn't want a bunch of kids around. I had to bike 3 or 4 miles home, but it was a tough ride because of the pain to my body and ego. The worse part was my girlfriend said something like "I don't know what happened, my old boyfriend and I used to do that all the time (ouch)".

- Haven't fallen with clipless peddles yet, but many times have that panic feeling when I realize that I'm about to fall and haven't unclipped yet, only to get my foot out with milliseconds to spare. I'm sure it's going to happen someday.

I once watched myself hit a curb at low speed. I just didn't react at all. I don't know what I was thinking. I went over the bars onto the grass and the bike landed on top of me. No injuries. Being on a college campus though, there was some kind of party going on up in the overlooking balcony. They all clapped. I think I might have bowed or something. Then they tossed me a beer and I drank it on the spot.

Good times.