The Chainring Massacre, Detective Work, and Defense

Mystery Canyon bike hit from behind on LSD

So last Tuesday evening we, and by "we" I mean the local cycling community, learned that a rider had been hit from behind on Lakeshore Drive, presumably in the right lane with the big bicycles painted on it and the signs that say "Bicycles may use full lane." The driver had stopped and said he'd been blinded by the sun, which wasn't unreasonable considering the time of day and direction, not that it was an excuse for continuing to drive without being able to see what was in front of his car. Strangely, in fact extremely strangely, nobody seemed to know who the rider was. A couple of riders had happened upon the scene as the police were about to leave, and all they knew was that (a) the rider had been taken away in an ambulance and was "stable," and (b) the police were going to leave what was left of the carbon fiber Canyon with carbon Mavic wheels and Garmin and Speedplay pedals on the side of the road like it was a piece of debris. Kristina, who arrived as the police were leaving, got Matt to come pick up the broken bike. Thus began a week-long detective story to identify the rider and get the bike back to him. Once word went out on FB, everyone with a Canyon bike was identified and contacted and none of them had been in a crash. The plot thickened. The Garmin was investigated to see where and when the mystery rider rode, and it turned out that most of the rides started downtown near Poydras, probably at a Condo. I searched Strava but couldn't turn up anything solid. That nobody in the competitive cycling community had a clue was rather shocking, since the bike wasn't exactly some department store junk, but a fairly legit racing bike.

Found him!

It wasn't until Monday that Matthew J got the Garmin files from Charlie T and tediously created short Strava segments along the route the mystery rider had taken until he finally got a name - Miguel Solano - who nobody seemed to know. Using resources that will remain confidential, I was able to track down the rider's contact information and ultimately his FB page. Surprisingly, we had three mutual friends, all in Texas, all cyclists. The phone number was called and by Monday afternoon he'd been contacted. He had been at University Medical Center with a fractured L1 vertebra, had surgery, and was recovering. I felt so relieved that we had finally solved the mystery. It had been bothering me for a week!

Danielle preparing for her presentation

On Friday Danielle did her dissertation defense, cleanly jumping the last major hurdle for her PhD in Epidemiology from LSUHSC. I sat in for the presentation but then had to run (almost literally) back to my office for an important conference call, then went to the LSU Dental School for their School of Public Health crawfish boil, the back to work for a meeting. Danielle will be heading back to Olympia at the end of the week, then returning for graduation for a few days. In the interim she will be starting a new job at the Washington State Department of Health in Tumwater, which is basically part of the Olympia metro area. We are very proud of her.

Fog and wet roads on Saturday, but a solid training ride anyway.

It was a Giro Ride weekend for me, which was good considering all of the other things going on. Saturday's Giro featured a lot of heavy fog for practically the entire ride, so when I went out on Sunday morning, thankfully in summer kit, I was glad to see that there was just a little bit of actual fog, even though it felt like I was riding in a light rain on the way to Starbucks. The ride itself had a good turnout and there were a few at the front keeping the pace high, so that was good. I was planning on going to Pontchatoula right after the Giro since a number of the Tulane riders needed a ride to a end-of-season crawfish boil over at Dustin's place. I was mostly hanging out in the draft and things went nicely out to the turnaround at Venetian Isles. There was a bit of a tailwind on the way back, and just as things were picking up, Matt flatted and everyone stopped. We got going again pretty quickly and of course the speed got fairly high heading back down Chef highway and onto that little stretch of I-510 before we turned onto Lake Forest Blvd. As I've probably mentioned before, Lake Forest Blvd. is a concrete road on top of swamp mud, so it's a minefield of cracks and sharp-edged holes. So naturally whoever was at the front decided it would be a good idea to go 27 mph there. So I'm sitting in this long thin line of riders when I see a little gap opening up a couple of riders ahead. Just then, Matt comes up on the left and Keith N moves over onto his wheel and I move over onto Keith's wheel as Matt starts closing the gap at 29 mph.

After the crash. Keith on the right trying to walk it off.

Things were going just great for a little while until suddenly I see Keith's bike sliding sideways in front of me, which washes out my front wheel and dumps me basically on top of his bike. It seemed like we slid for a really long time, and I had time to roll onto my back before grinding to a halt. I picked myself up and took a quick inventory. The bike, surprisingly, seemed fine. More surprisingly, I still had most of my skin. I could feel a light burn on my right hip, there was road rash on my right lower leg, and there was blood running down my left leg from my knee to my socks, but I hadn't hit my head and I hadn't broken any bones, so I was kind of excited about that.

Keith's hip. His arm and elbow were similar.

Keith, on the other hand, looked far worse, and I surmised that I had probably surfed on top of him and his bike for a little while before making contact with the concrete. He was missing patches of skin best measured in square feet. Remarkably, his bike was also fully functional since it had been a sliding type of crash with no real sudden impact. In fact, the "incident detection" on my Garmin hadn't even been triggered (I'd set it off by accident just the day before when I dropped the front wheel to the ground after hosing it off outside). So while most of the group continued on, six or seven of us rode back the rest of the way rather slowly. I could see some nice black impressions from Keith's chain on my arm, and on my left shorts, extending all the way to my kneecap, was the impression of a chainring. I had three good puncture wounds from the chainring on my kneecap, which had bled rather profusely for a couple of minutes. Back at home I took a quick and rather stinging shower, cleaned the wounds up as much as I could (I'm sure I will still end up with a grease tattoo on my kneecap, however), closed the skin with some would closures, and rushed off to pick up people for the crawfish boil. Fortunately the injuries weren't too painful, so everything was fine until I was back in New Orleans that evening and the knee started to hurt. I was a little swollen. On Monday I went for an easy short ride on the levee with Danielle, mostly just to keep the knee moving, and then headed to work after taking a 12-hour Aleve, which worked pretty well.

Relatively minor injuries for me - relatively

This morning I headed out to meet the Tuesday levee ride, not knowing if I'd be able to make the full ride or keep up. My knee was still hurting every time I put pressure on the pedals, so I wasn't very confident. After waiting for a train, I met up with the other riders who had delayed their start for a few minutes because of the train. I told them I'd be sitting on the back and possibly turning around early. We were about fifteen minutes into the ride when my knee started feeling better. I don't know if it was just that the pedaling had loosened it up, or that the Naproxin had kicked in, but by the time we were halfway out to Ormond I was able to start taking pulls. We weren't going super fast, so that certainly helped. We picked up a few riders along the way, and on the way back one of them basically attacked when his turn came at the front, just after Pat had pulled off. Pat had slowed the pace by one or two mph, so perhaps the guy felt like he should ramp it up again, but anyway he went way overboard. I heard Rich say something, and could hear Pat also saying something as he struggled to get back on. That pushed the speed up from the 23-24 mph we'd been going to around 29 mph, at which point the rider pulled off and asked "did I do something wrong?" as he dropped back. I think the result was that he had gapped off two riders, and ultimately himself as well. Anyway, by then my knee was feeling basically normal and I was not feeling any pain, so that was kind of a relief. I'd been wondering if I'd done more damage than I'd thought, but I now think it was just the inflammation and swelling.