Lucky Pie Criterium

I always love this race!  It is a great venue near downtown Louisville and always has great competition as it has been the State Championship Crit race the past few years.  Another draw is the kids' race that rewards participants with Sweet Cow ice cream after the finish.  Gavin actually aged out and either has to race with a license or just be a spectator, but Gage (above) got to toe the line and show us what he had.

It was pretty impressive to watch--in the 7-8 year old group, he was 2nd with just one boy ahead of him at the finish line.  He was quite happy with that performance and felt pretty professional with his newly acquired racing bike from Gavin!

The other part of this day's tale is a bit more exciting.  I raced in the 35+3s for a shot at the state championship jersey.  I was feeling pretty good but the race was very sketchy.  You can see me in the above picture sitting around 10th position out of maybe 65 guys as we come around one of the corners.  A few laps later, someone tapped my back wheel and went down causing a three or four person crash.  I didn't go down but had to get a spare wheel at the pit because my wheel was rubbing my frame from where the guy hit me.  Back in the pack we continued to race and I got into pretty decent position for the last few laps.  With one lap to go, I was in about 6th or 7th place and we were all lined out and gunning it.  I would have ideally been in 3rd or 4th but the competition was tight.  In the finishing straight, with about 300 meters to go, we were going all out in a single file line and there was a small gap between me and the person in front of me.  Someone came up from my right shoulder and tried to shoot through the gap and ended up sweeping my front wheel out at 35 mph.  Nothing ever ends well in that situation or at that speed...

I remember flying over my handlebars and landing on the back of my legs/bottom facing backwards and then tumbling off the side of the road.  Then, just pain...intense pain.  As we had just spent 50 minutes racing at the top of our ability, I was having trouble breathing and it felt like someone had stabbed me in the side.  I was unable to move, not because I had broken my back, but because the rest of my body seemed incapable, so I just laid there.  Another minute or two later, course marshals and medical personnel came to attend to me and slowly rolled me over to check me out.  I had a large contusion on my hind quarters, many scratches and scrapes up and down my body, and something was majorly wrong with my ribs.  I was in bad shape.  Fortunately or unfortunately, my family was there.  I remember Gavin running up as I laid there and then instructed someone to take him back away.  I didn't want him to see me in this condition.

After about 10 minutes we were able to get me into a medical car and taken to the medical tent where they continued to check me out.  Due to the pain I was experiencing and the trouble breathing they strongly recommended taking me to the hospital in an ambulance, an idea that I couldn't really get behind.  However, as we pulled Tara's minivan up in order to load me into it, it because increasingly clear that I was unable to get off of the cot due to intense rib pain.  Every time I moved or shifted weight, the pain was unbearable.  Finally, they informed me that if an ambulance came they could give me some IV drugs to tolerate the pain for the move and I was all in from then on out.  They got some morphine running and then loaded me up and off we went to the hospital.  Thankfully, the story ends reasonably well, but not perfectly.  Once in the ER they performed many CT scans and Ultrasounds to ensure I hadn't bruised or damaged my heart, lungs, or any other internal organs with the crash.  I ended up fracturing the cartilage off the end of a few ribs and now the ribs were sticking out about an inch above the rest of the rib cage.  I also ended up separating the dermal layer from the muscle in about a six inch circular patch on the back of my hamstring where I initially impacted the road and I have lost all feeling in that area due to the trauma.  Hopefully, that numbness will subside and feeling will return one day.  In the end, I was able to go home by night time after wracking up a $35,000 bill in the ER.  I am thankful that my family was there to collect my bikes and ensure I made it to the hospital.  I think this was a traumatic event for us all and is definitely the least fun part of racing.