Since Sage has been riding with me, I have been making him wear his biking helmet. I had a good friend about 20 years ago that was riding and fell from his bike. He spent several weeks in the hospital and then had a long recovery from his head injury. I am very cautious with my kids because of this. I am not so cautious myself though and today I paid the price. I was just heading down my drive and down my street when I realized that I had not reset and started my forerunner 201, so I reached down to do so and did not realize how fast I was going. When I look up, I was at he end of my street almost and getting very close to the four lane road I have to cross to get to the path I ride. I immediately reached for the breaks as fast as I could but one hand made it before the other and I locked up my front wheel causing me to go over the handle bars with the bicycle flipping over me and landing on top. I slid several feet and rolled and finally stopped. Fortunately no one was around to video tape it, although we probably would have won some money on America’s Funniest Videos.

I got up slowly and surveyed the damage. I scraped my face a little and my right shoulder and arm. My right leg has a strawberry and my left calf was gouged a bit by the bike somehow. The main problem is that when I went over the handlebars, I tried to catch myself on the pavement and both hands are scraped up. The left hand has some significant pain and a little swelling. I am hoping it is not broken, although that would not slow my training. Overall, not too badly hurt, just sore and embarassed. This afternoon I will be out buying a biking helmet. Do any of the readers have any suggestions on a good helmet? I may wait a couple of days to buy it since I doubt I ride for a while anyway. So, a little help here would be greatly appreciated. By the way, Debbie and I had the winning bid on a tandem bike on ebay. We should receive that this week sometime. Very exciting.