Long rides and a hard lesson

This week I've had my two longest bike rides I have ever completed. Wednesday I went with a group from the Mark Logic User Conference for a breath taking 27 mile ride over the Golden Gate Bridge and back.

I was very pleased to see that my regular training mates had scheduled a 35 mile bike ride for today. This ride took us all over the south Bay from Santa Clara to Mountain View to Milpitas and back. This was great and I am I getting used to spending more time in the saddle.

Here is a link to the ride - you may need to zoom out to see the entire route.

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2819669

I also had a hard lesson regarding riding and following. On Wednesday about 2 miles into the ride a rider in front of me drifted into my front wheel and knocked me down off of the bike. I suffered some road rash and some bruises all of which felt much worse the next day.

The one thing I was thinking as we started off today was that it would sure hurt to fall again since I was still a bit sore and still had scabs on my road rash from Wednesday. Unfortunately there was a near repeat incident at about mile 17 along a particularly fast stretch of the ride. Richard the guy I was following stood up and stopped peddling causing him to slow down as I was motoring along. The result was the same. I hit his back tire at nearly full speed and was again slammed down on the pavement at about 15mph. The really unfortunate thing was that it was the same side of my body as Wednesday so I not only created new wounds but opened up my existing scrapes. I must say the pain was significantly more acute this time because of the tenderness of my knee, hip and elbow all of which took the brunt of the fall and there was a lot more blood. The result was not pretty, blood running down my my elbow and leg in multiple places.

After walking off the pain and checking my bike we determined that both of us (the other rider fell hard too in this case) were OK. The initial reaction was to cut our ride short and head home as we happened to be at a place in the course that brought us close to home. After riding about 1/2 mile though we decided that since there was no serious damage we might as well finish the ride and that is what we did. So the majority of the ride I had a now very sore elbow and knee but otherwise did fine for the remaining 18 miles.

The hard lesson in this case was to give myself another 1ft following distance when riding. I think in both cases that would have been enough to avoid the crashes.

I am sure I am going to be VERY sore tomorrow.