tl;dr The bike's okay, except the top of the bell sheared off. My injuries aren't especially gory, but I'd like taken into consideration the bits of vegetation implanted into my face.Today was the sort of day where it was too nice to do the gardening. I don't have a garden; it was also too nice to do spreadsheets and marketing emails. So I decided to give the newly excavated School Bike a shakedown on the trails around Cannock Chase.
There was a lot of this:
A fair bit of this:
A couple of these:
(nothing happened)
Truth be told, I'd rather have been on the difficult Red Route, but even I'd recognised that trying that with a 20+ year-old MBSO and little off-road experience would be a little rash. So I'd opted for the moderate Blue Route instead to avoid any narsty occurences. The Blue Route! What's the worst that could happen?!
Dear Reader, please picture an elongated 12.2 mile 'circular' route. And then, if you will, picture the point at 6.2 miles along that route. Let us for the sake of argument call it "The Point Most Distant from my Parked Car". It was about here that yours truly started hankering for something a bit more challenging than the "wide gravel tracks and forest roads" so on a gentle descent I popped up onto the single-track that had been worn alongside it.
You can see it top right in this photo:
You can also, perhaps, see where this is going ...and where I failed to until a bit too late for my slightly-too-ineffective brakes to stop me in time or slow me enough to make that tight right hand bend where the track goes around the sharp drop.
I made it down the drop okay, but see that tree stump?
No, I didn't either.
Clipped it with my front wheel enough to send me somersaulting over the handlebars. eep!
Luckily my fall was broken by that bramble patch...
I had to spend some time with the self-portrait mode of my phone removing thorns from my face, and I've been doing similarly for my arms since getting home. I'm still finding the blimmin' things!
My left arm, left thigh, left calf and to a lesser extent my right thigh look similar to this (my right arm):
I think my right leg must have hit bike before it hit brambles because I have a bruise on my thigh that is turning colours similar in hue to the top I was wearing and I'm not sure what my right knee is going to do, but whatever it is it's going to be very adamant about it when it does. Ice has been applied.
I'm not sure what happened to cause that (the bike, not the pile behind it), but it's not a loosely clamped saddle. I couldn't open the quick-release and it took a bit of boshing with both hands to swing the saddle back around again.
I eventually found the top half of the bell that had sheared off in the impact, but I see now that it's lost the spinny ringy thing too. I've checked the tyres and they seem thorn-free, so the bike's still in the boot of the car ready for Bristol duties tomorrow and Friday. I may not be skyving off early to do the Bristol-Bath path as originally planned, however.
