It’s been almost a year since I started riding my bike to work in one form or another, and it was finally my time to eat the pavement.

It had been raining and misting all day Thursday, and the temperature fell below freezing that night. So, when I got up on Friday morning, there was some ice on the roads. I took Dotty for a walk and tried to gauge the slickness. Based on the walk, the roads seemed fine.

What I failed to grasp is the extreme sensitivity of bike tires to bad conditions. The tires I use are high-pressure racing tires. They have almost no tread on them (to reduce rolling resistance), plus they are very skinny. All these factors together mean that I have very little surface area in contact with the road. A seat-of-the-pants guess would be that I have 0.5 square inches of surface area on each tire in contact with the road at any given time (0.5″ across and 1″ long). Plus, if either tire (especially the front) loses traction, the bike becomes unstable very quickly. So, it really doesn’t take that much ice to send me down.

I got my bike ready and set out like any other morning. I rode for about 5 minutes, taking things extra slow in case there was ice. I was taking a left turn when all of a sudden the bike slid out from under me. As the tires slid out, the bike came down on the left side, whipping me against the pavement. I was probably only going 5-10 mph at the time, so the speed wasn’t a huge factor, but the side of my head still came down pretty hard on the street. My helmet took all the impact and I didn’t even see stars or get disoriented. That was enough evidence for me that helmets are worth the money and hassle.

Luckily, my feet popped out of the pedals without any trouble. This has always been my biggest fear. I use clipless pedals that have a binding system allowing you to mechanically attach your special biking shoes to the pedal. It is similar to a ski-boot binding. Anyways, my biggest fear was that in a crash, my feet and legs would get wrapped up in the bike frame and the bindings would not release. In that case, I would be risking some pretty bad joint injury. As I said, though, my feet popped right out of the pedals and I was able to get clear of the bike.

The initial crash didn’t really hurt all that much. I jammed one of my thumbs when I hit the ground, and my helmet took a hit, but otherwise I felt pretty much OK. I climbed back on the bike and rode home. When I got there, Sarah said that I should come back to bed and take the morning off. It seemed like a good idea, so I took her advice.

The final tally of injuries is pretty minor, considering the possibilities. I have a rasberry on my upper thigh about the size of a grapefruit, a cut on my knee, and a cut on my ankle. The bike went down on the left side, while all the complicated derailler and gearing mechanisms are on the right. The alignment of the front brakes got screwed, but 2 minutes with the allen-wrench fixed that. The brake hoods got dragged along the pavement, and the tops are filed down, as if someone took coarse-grained sandpaper and worked them for a few minutes. The most puzzling issues is that the left brake hood has been twisted a bit so it faces inward more than the right brake hood. The brakes and shifting still work fine, but it looks weird and feels a bit ungainly. I’ll see if the bike shop people can do anything.

Other than that, the bike seems to be fine. I can’t even find any scratches on the seat or frame. There is some sort of clicking sound, but I can’t remember if that was there before. Plus, I threw the rear derailler a little out of alignment, but that could have been there before too. In any case, the bike is perfectly ride-worthy, and I rode it to the train station this morning.

Let’s just hope that I can go at least another year before I have to kiss the pavement again.