Well, it took 11 years and something like 35,000 miles of cycling before the inevitable would happen.\u00a0 This past Saturday, I had my first biking accident.\u00a0 It happened at the end of a 90+ mile ride and just a few blocks from home.\u00a0 As I crossed 135th Street in Harlem, a road that features three lanes in each direction, one on each side for parking, and two on each side for driving.\u00a0 A Lincoln town car, a livery cab, was double-parked and in order to pass it, I quickly glanced behind me to make sure I had the time and space.\u00a0 Within a very tight moment, the driver’s side read door swung open literally within two feet of my arrival… and I hit the edge of that door, not the wide or broad side, at about 18 miles per hour.\u00a0 I didn’t even have time to feather my brakes or twitch to the left 8 inches.\u00a0 Upon contact with the door, I vaulted forward doing a flip over the handlebars and landed a good four feet in front of the car on my back.\u00a0 I was still clicked into the bike and it landed on me.\u00a0 I could hear cars screeching to a halt and was relieved to not get run over.<\/p>\n
I waited a good thirty seconds before attempting to move.\u00a0 In retrospect, I realize that I did so to get an assessment of the damage to my body.\u00a0 I knew fairly quickly that I wasn’t badly hurt and within a few moments, some guys came over to help me up.\u00a0 As they did that, some bystanders yelled at them to not touch me in case I had a spinal injury.\u00a0 I knew I was okay, and appreciated the help to get upright.\u00a0 My bike, fortunately, was not damaged at all, so I carefully walked to the sidewalk, propped the bike up against a pole, and then began reviewing my injuries.\u00a0 They were limited to just 5-6 abrasions and some immediate bruising.\u00a0\u00a0A bystander called 911 next to me while the driver and passengers apologized profusely to me.\u00a0 I wasn’t able to laugh at the time, but a funny story came from this when the called told the 911 operator that a cyclist just got hit by a car.\u00a0 The driver of the car quickly and enthusiastically yelled, “No no no no, he hit me.\u00a0 I didn’t hit him.\u00a0 No no no.”\u00a0 He was right and that distinction would be important, if I had cared to take issue with the driver or file a police report, which I didn’t.<\/p>\n
Within a few minutes, EMS, FDNY, and NYPD vehicles showed up and tended to me in the back of an ambulance.\u00a0 I explained that without neck or back injuries, I should be okay to be released, and after checking my vitals (I was wearing my heart rate monitor, so I actually made their job easier!), they let me go.\u00a0 I carefully rode home and checked my body when I got home.\u00a0 All seemed okay.\u00a0 Even my new Ironman Germany cycling kit was okay with no tears or rips.\u00a0 Amazing.<\/p>\n
My coach had prescribed a 45 minute run after this ride and I was very sure that I’d be perfectly excused to bail on that.\u00a0 But, when I got home, I felt like doing so would be wimpy, so I put on my run gear and decided that I’d run just a little bit as an assessment.\u00a0 I made it to Central Park, about 1.2 miles away, and went to the water fountain where I splashed water on all of my injuries.\u00a0 It stung but I was okay with it.\u00a0 I then ran to the next water fountain a good 10 minutes away and did it again.\u00a0 It stung less, so I kept going.\u00a0 In the end, I ran around 9 miles at a very good clip and felt like at the end, I had plenty of gas in the tank to run another bunch of miles.\u00a0 Very encouraging!<\/p>\n
On Sunday, I cycled another few hours including a focus on hills for the first half, and a higher intensity effort for the return trip home.\u00a0 While I felt some understandable fatigue from all of these miles, and was sore from accident, I felt quite good.\u00a0 It was really encouraging to think that I could do back-t0-back rides, like last weekend, and despite an accident and long run afterwards, having good power made me feel like I could have a good day in Kona!\u00a0 To that end, I followed coach’s advice and did a few sessions in a sauna to get my blood plasma levels up.\u00a0 I went to Fernando’s building that features a health club and sauna, and put in my first 18 minute session.\u00a0 In the beginning, it wasn’t so hard.\u00a0 I was focused on reading my\u00a0book, but at the 12 minute mark, it got too hot for me to even read.\u00a0 I made it to 18 minutes, stepped out to take a 1 minute cold shower, spent another minute filling up my water bottle and hydrating, then went back in.\u00a0 The second 18 minute session was brutal.\u00a0 I had to put the book down at the 6 minute mark, and for the next 12 minutes, I rocked side-to-side and chanted a bit as I watched the seconds tick by.\u00a0 It took all of my mental strength to remain in that cauldron.\u00a0 For the record, it was 188 degrees!\u00a0 The next cold shower lasted 8 minutes and while I really wanted to complete the session with my final 18-20 minute session, I decided that I was too depleted and that my heart rate had spiked too high for it to be done safely… so I called it a day.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow, I have a 2.5 hour run before work which means getting up at 4 a.m. and getting out on the road some time before 5 a.m.\u00a0 Ugh.\u00a0 As of this writing, 26 days till the race, and 21 days until our flight out there.\u00a0 I can’t wait!\u00a0 Fingers crossed that there are no more snafus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, it took 11 years and something like 35,000 miles of cycling before the inevitable would happen.\u00a0 This past Saturday, I had my first biking accident.\u00a0 It happened at the end of a 90+ mile ride and just a few blocks from home.\u00a0 As I crossed 135th Street in Harlem, a road that features three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-training"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":678,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676\/revisions\/678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gregghgordon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}