I am a terrible XC rider.. buang alot of times in BT and T15. It's only natural.
I once endo-ed over the bar and the bike landed on my head. Even though I was wearing my helmet, I was knocked out momentarily. When I came to, my first thoughts were how pretty the flowers were, and how beautiful our world was. Then I went back to sleep, right in the middle of the trail, before I heard the faint sound of voices calling my name.
I think that was my second ride in T15 ages ago. It was at that bumpy downhill around the dual slalom area.
My very first stunner of an accident was a few years ago when I was in Ubin, doing this hardcore XC trail. Hell, it was just an old dirtrack, abandoned by former plantation owners. Very technical stuff. My cycling mate braked abruptly in front of me and I had to veer off. My helmeted head jammed into a thick low branch of a tree (not those snappy twig-like ones mind you, a real solid branch) and I felt like Steve Austin had given me a personal Stone Cold stunner.
The same cycling mate cut my path and caused me to buang in the middle of the road with a car bearing down on us as I lay there bleeding the shti out of myself. This was a year later at Lim Chu Kang. I groggily remember having my ass and bike dragged off the road before I became roadkill.
I've had countless buang-ing incidents at BT and T15 too. Many times I had to go home in a taxi or in one instance, the van of a kind fellow rider. I have forgotten his name, but if you were the one who patched me up with your first aid kit and very generously offered me your vehicle back to my home in Yishun, thank you very much. The X-Ray scan at the Polyclinic revealed a very bad knee sprain, thankfully nothing worse.
A friend of mine, on his virgin ride in BT, flipped off a huge rock and his body, horizontally floating in mid-air, spun a full three hundred sixty before he landed flat on his back, groaning. I was right behind him and I felt my heart go up to my throat. We needed a MEDEVAC (medical evacuation) from the friendly National Park Rangers. And no, they did not come in a helicopter with a stretcher slung underneath. We had to drag our injured friend out to Dairy Farm road before they could extract us with their pick-up truck.
Lamp posts and sign boards are frequent victims of my poor bike handling.
I was once hit by a car, and what struck me was how calm I was even though my bike and body were being dragged under. He finally realised that something was jamming him up, looked up from his ice cream, saw me just staring back at him and hit his brakes. We then made sure that I was OK, and more importantly, there were no scratches endured by my bike and his car in that incident.
Many more other incidents, some involving monitor lizards and those DAMN monkeys.
God I hate monkeys. People chionging downhill at BT they suddenly dash out. CCB.
Like one poster said :
Life is short. Ride hard.