Kind of in a rush here. I have a 5 pm appointment in Ft. Collins for Bromont with Trent Newcomer. Bromont is now in an arthritis study for the next month, so he’s gonna have to be doing periodical visits there. He doesn’t have super bad arthritis, but I want to make sure he’s doing as well as possible. He’s 11 now.

It is about time to get the hell out of Dodge. It is super hot here in Kansas. I’m not sure what the official high was yesterday here in Topeka, but my Garmin was reading up to 107 when I rode yesterday afternoon.

And yesterday afternoon, I pulled “a Catherine” and completely fell apart. I rode 20 something miles feeling alright, but when I got back to Topeka, the last three miles, I could only ride about 13mph. It was super ugly.

I finally made it to town and went by a local hospital to visit Dennis Weinbeck, a local that crashed last week and broke himself up pretty good. 8 broken ribs, collapsed lung, and broken scapula or something like that. He was doing alright until a couple days ago when he had to check back with blood clots in his lungs. I have no idea why they didn’t give him blood thinner when he was brought in so smashed? Anyway, Dennis was doing way better and it was a good visit.

Trudi is flying into Denver this afternoon, so she’ll be at Vincent’s tonight. Bill is driving later and picking her up at the airport, since Bromont’s appointment is at the same time she lands.

Okay, I need to get going.

Dennis feeling a lot better in the hospital.

Pretty crazy hot yesterday here in Kansas.

Bromont likes to find the shade on his “walks”.

I’ve been thinking a bit about breaking my hip from falling at 12 mph in a wet corner. I honestly didn’t think it was possible for that to happen. I’ve fallen on my hips more times than I’d like to think about and nearly every one of those other times I was going more than twice, to three times, as fast.

Honestly, I think the lack of speed and abruptness of the fall was the reason it broke. It’s not like I hit my hip on the road. The bone is way deep in my upper thigh. It is that my lower leg hit the ground and leveraged that force on my bone and it broke above the femur. The speed I hit the pavement, because of the lack of fiction from water, really added to the whole outcome. The same as the first week in the Tour, lots of crashes and broken things because of water.

I used to think that collarbones and separated shoulder were the most common injuries in cycling. After crashing and posting it here, I couldn’t believe how many different people contacted me and sent me x-rays of their breaks. I’m rethinking it now.

One reason that I think more bones are breaking in the sport is because our bikes aren’t connected to us when we hit the ground. When we were securely connected to our bikes, thru toe straps, our bikes took a certain amount of the force. I have lots of recent videos of myself crashing and in everyone, I’ve twisted my feet, trying to avoid the crash, enough, to unclip my pedals. So, my bike get launched away from me before I hit the pave.

You might not think that rubbing your pedal quil on the ground would take that much force, but they did. Also our handlebars. Any force that our bikes absorb hitting the ground is energy that doesn’t go into our bodies, thus it is less likely to get injured as badly.

Anyway, I’m not trading in my clipless pedals for the sake of safety. But, it might take me a while to get comfortable again, taking a left hand corner in the rain.

I’m hopefully going to get another x-ray today or tomorrow to see how this is healing. It’s been 8 weeks now.

Toe clips and straps worked pretty well back in the day. I snagged this picture off eBay. I wonder if the guy selling these knows he put the straps on in reverse.