Ode to the ZMPHF

So, you’d imagine that the riskiest part of riding a bike might be flying downhill at 30 mph. There’s nothing between your head and the road except your helmet if you fall – and I just choose to believe that will never happen to me or to Stephen or to my kids. Stephen fell making a sharp turn on a wet wooden bridge a couple years back. It scared him enough that sometimes he walks across that bridge even today. It cracked his helmet…so he’s got good reason to be scared.

Erin’s fallen a couple times from turning too sharply. Because she’s Erin, she gets back up and dusts herself off and wears clothes that show off her bruises and road burn until they heal.

Nathan announced early this season that he hadn’t had a single fall in 2009…and then rode headlong into a tree. All of us got quite a kick out of that (he wasn’t hurt in the least). He had one more fall later this year when he turned too short. He scraped up his knee and Erin had a wonderful time cleaning up and bandaging the wound.

And then…we have my specialty.

The zero-mile-per-hour-fall (ZMPHF) is an art form. First, you have to be wearing bike shoes and using “clipless” pedals. When I graduated to a road bike last summer, I graduated to this type of pedal. On my first trip out, Stephen patiently explained that I needed to develop a routine of “unclipping” the same foot as I slowed down EVERY time I did so. Since ignoring Stephen’s advice is what I do, I ignored him. And fell. Hard. Less than one block from home. I had a HUGE bruise on my hip from that one. I wobbled for a day or two actually. I recall showing my friend Tammy the bruise at the gym one afternoon. She advised me to find something safer to do with my time.

So, when the season started up again, I was a wee toady bit nervous about falling again. I got what I thought was THE fall out of the way on our first family ride. We got up to the intersection leading out of our neighborhood, unclipped the wrong foot and toppled over. Nathan laughed. I broke my water bottle holder on that fall. I had a lovely, colorful, but slightly smaller bruise on my hip from that one. Lasted about two weeks.

See, the thing is, in order for the bike to stay standing upright, it needs either a) forward motion or b) a prop of some sort. My foot is supposed to be the prop. So when I don’t clip out, the bike has no way of staying up. Since I’m ON the bike…I go where it goes. Over.

So, on our first or second trip out for a night ride, I got to the end of a street, pulled up to a stop and unclipped on the right side…and leaned to the left….and fell over. I thought quickly enough to get my most padded body part down first – and somehow or another suffered road burn – when your skin just kind of tears off in patches -- on my butt. This got a lot of laughs at the house. Including one from that darling husband of mine who declared that he wasn’t sure we had a bandage big enough to cover the wound. Quite the comedian, that guy.

And then, I figured that I’d gotten into the proper routine, so my falling days were over. I went 8 weeks without a fall. But on the MS 150 last weekend, we had to slow way down to roll through an accident site. I don’t like to unclip, so I didn’t. I kept slowly moving forward (see the paragraph above) until…all of a sudden…there was nowhere else to go…I stopped. I didn’t unclip. And over I went. Of course, there’s something sort of worse about falling over in a crowd of bicyclists. At least that time nobody laughed (out loud).

I, apparently, can RIDE the bike. I just can’t stand still.