Splat!

The ride out to the lakefront was quite quiet this morning. Since it's Mother's Day, I guess a lot of people were at home cooking up eggs with smiley faces and heart-shaped toast. I didn't really know what to expect of this Giro Ride, but I figured the turnout would be pretty light. Since I'd left home a bit early, I hit Lakeshore Drive around ten minutes early, just as a small group containing Diego was heading out. I went ahead and rode down to the parking lot and got in with a small group that left right at 7 am as usual. I figured the earlier group would turn around or wait for us. Apparently I was wrong, because the next time we saw those guys they were well on their way back from the turnaround at Venetian Isles and we still had a mile to go. Our little paceline of maybe ten or fifteen was rolling along at a moderate pace - not particularly easy, but certainly a couple of notches below Saturday's mark. It was quite warm, with a pretty good breeze blowing warm Gulf air over the city, but at least there was hardly any traffic.

As we made our way down Chef Highway the pace picked up a bit and the number of riders in the rotation at the front started to drop a bit. I was having my own problems with the new handlebars I'd put on last night. I guess I was fooled by the unfamiliar curve and had gotten the brake levers way too low and the angle of the bar in general was way off. Practically from the start my fingers were going numb and I was just basically uncomfortable.

Anyway, as we got close to the turnaround we saw the premature departure group coming the other way, but we'd been doing our own thing so long already we didn't bother to turn around. Besides, the pace was ramping up nicely for a last little surge. When we were a few hundred meters from the usual sprint point, Keith Andrews attacked down the left side to put in a little sprint. Nobody else really went with him, which turned out to have been quite fortunate.

A few pedal strokes into this sprint, Keith's bike suddenly went all squirrely and then -- Splat! -- he hit the ground hard. Either his chain suddenly skipped or he pulled out of a pedal (probably both and in that order). His foot went straight to the ground, his bars went sideways and the rest was just up to pure Newtonian physics. His front wheel ended up in the bushes, one of his carbon fork blades shattered, his right knee went hard into the asphalt, and he whacked his head hard enough to crack his helmet in a number of places. I was very relived when he sat up immediately because it definitely could have been worse.

I think all of us had ridden out to the ride, but we'd noticed that Robin was in the earlier group so we gave him a call to request emergency extraction. By then he was somewhere around Hayne Blvd., so Mark and I stayed with Keith and waited maybe 40 minutes for Robin to get to his car and then make the drive all the way out to the far end of the Giro route. It was kind of a long ride home into the wind for Mark and me after that.

Keith later told me he'd gotten five stitches in his knee, but I guess everything else checked out OK. Man, just goes to show you, you never know.....