Welcome back to Breakfast Club, stories about life in motion and the ideas that shape our movement through the world.
You are moving.
Forward, that is. Alight with speed, the air of your locomotion rustles in your ears. The ground whizzes beneath you.
Take a moment to consider the audacity of moving fast on a bicycle—a pace at which the world visually fuzzes. Watching a person on a bike today, our ancestors would have been astounded. How you go!
And then suddenly you are not. Going, that is. Your body is halted, that whizzing ground now present with an immediacy. You land shattering and crunching, your body turned into wreckage.
How to describe a bike crash?1
The word ‘crash’ is derived from the Middle English crasschen, “to break into pieces”, itself a variant of the earlier craken, “to crack open.” The root here is ‘break’. It is an apt term for something so intense. There is a before and an after. In between is a crash.
To fall at speed on a bike is wheeled abruption: the body, laden with momentum is separated from that energy—colliding, crumpling, collapsing—into a relatively immovable mass.
Know that time dilates. A Michigan cyclist described a mid-race crash thus: “I slid across the pavement and everything seemed to move in slow motion.” Motorcyclists on message boards describe accidents with a “slow motion effect.” One rider recalls:
“The shared experience [of multiple crashes] is time slowing down … it’s amazing how long 1-3 seconds actually takes. How almost a half-hour episode of experience can happen in that sliver of time.”
Sometimes the reverse occurs: time skips ahead. Mathieu van der Poul was bemused after a slide out careened him against a metal barrier during last August’s world cycling championships. “I don’t know,” van der Poel said afterward. “In this corner, all of a sudden I was on the ground.” He remounted and won the race.
At their worst, crashes shut down the mind. Fabio Jakobsen recalls little of his horrifying crash at the Tour of Poland. “I remember being on the wheel of Davide Ballerini and Florian Sénéchal.” The sprinter hit the barriers going 50 mph at the finish line. “After that it’s black and I don’t remember anything anymore.”2
Prior to clipping into my first road bike, I’d been in a couple fender benders. I thought I knew the sensation of crashing. Gentle reader, I did not.
You don’t realize that asphalt has a sound until your helmet slams against it—a definitive “chunk” of plastic foam against solid bitumen. There is a snarl of road grit scraping against ripping bib shorts, a clack and clatter of carbon fiber skipping over roadway.
One crash occurred while I raced a criterium in Statesville, North Carolina when a rider moved up on the inside line of a sharp turn. Sadly, the laws regarding the conservation of momentum still applied. As we whipped toward the finish, he collided into several riders and carnage ensued.
My bike and I ramped up the twisted body of some poor, lycra-bound soul. Launched momentarily airborne, I wondered, “Well, old boy, how are you going to get yourself out of this one?” I sailed into some fencing and landed upside down on a sidewalk.
It is a rare experience to be flung, tossed outward and tumbled through space. Maybe that’s why time passes slowly. The mind goes into overdrive to make sense of it. I get why cheerleaders and gymnasts enjoy the sensation. If being thrown into the air didn’t usually end painfully, the experience would be alluring. Once riding alone on some quiet roads along the Saluda River, my mind wandered and I took a turn too fast, zooming off a roadside ledge. I flipped over my handlebars. The sky is so blue, I thought as I somersaulted into a marsh below.
The musician Dave Matthews captures this drift in a track about a car crash in his solo album Some Devil:
I hit this corner
With my foot on the gas
I started sliding, I lose it
The tempo changes, slowing and spinning with the car, lingering on that “uh-oh” before the world shoves itself into us. Wait and see, Dave advises to all that are crashing, see what will become of us.
The song is a metaphor. About life more generally, and the perspective we gain in those “oh shit” moments when we wish to go back and be more grateful for what we have. But we never can. Even as we tumble along the tarmac, we move forward in time.
Flung outward—that is the human condition. The crashes before us are unseen and inevitable. Still, we ride onward because what else can we do? We know our clothes will rip, our skin will tear, and our bones will break.
Yes, you will crash. But this also means you will have an impact. To leave a mark on the world means taking risks, increasing speed, and grinding over life’s uneven pavement.
So get thee onwards. Dance on those pedals and crank on those gears. Put your head down and go. You will fall and it will hurt. But you’ll get up, dust yourself off, and forward you shall go.
Thanks for reading.
What’s your crash story? I’d love to hear about it. Share in the comments.
Tweets of the week
Parting thought
“People, don’t step on the tarmac.”
- Retired professional cyclist, Jens Voigt
That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading. Follow me on Notes, Strava, and what’s left of Twitter.
Let us put aside the collisions between bike and car. That is for another day. Or rather another fight, confronting the forces that decided thousands of humans being ripped apart to be an acceptable sacrifice for hyper convenience.
Jakobsen crashed into the roadside barriers, requiring airlift to a hospital with a brain contusion, fractured skull, and the loss of parts of his jawbone. He survived after a medically induced coma, and multiple reconstructive surgeries. He has returned to competition, winning three stages of the 2021 Vuelta a España and a stage of the 2022 Tour de France.
I don't remember my biggest crash. A car turned into the Botanical Garden parking lot as I was coming down Centennial Dr. I don't even remember waking up that morning.
It's extremely not "knowing" what happened that day, but on the plus side I've never had to relive it.
This is such a beautiful piece of writing. Thank you for finding the poetry in a crash.