February 26, 2024

Knocked Down:

In the unpredictable world of cycling, setbacks often serve as the motivation that propels us forward. The true essence lies not in avoiding falls, but in the tenacity to rise back up refreshed, embodying the spirit of getting up again.
Back in 1998 I was in a bad crash in Livermore, CA. in a criterium. The race was going well for me. I was able to avoid a wipe out at the beginning of the last lap. This broke the field up and left a handful of us to battle it out for the win. As we navigated the last few turns I was feeling good and sitting in 3rd place. Around the last corner the race opened up and the rider in front of me was gone like a rocket. I couldn't catch the other guy either so I was resigned to 3rd place which was cool. Within feet of the finish line I was hit from behind by a huge football player sized guy on a bike. I'm not calling him a racer, he was more of a goon. Get this; the street we were on was wide, really wide, like industrial park width. For him to not be able to go around me was pathetic. I ended up sliding down the street on my right side and across the finish line, then had the joy of hitting the curb. Of course I got up hotter than hot and went looking for the gorilla that took me down. I found him and let him know of my displeasure with his lack of skill and tactics. I recall there were people holding me back from getting close to the perpetrator. When my boiling blood cooled off I was whisked away to the first aid area and had my numerous wounds scrubbed clean by a friendly fireman. The white hot pain of this situation was about as bad as you can imagine. He patched me up and I gathered my crunched up bike and asked my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) to drive me to the emergency room. Side note, a person there had made a video on a camcorder of the finish sprint. I saw the replay and it was a clear foul. I had them show the officials and I was given 4th place. A bottle of wine and some cash was my prize. Yay!
At the ER the doc came in and looked at the areas of my body that were missing layers of skin and he said he would treat this like I was a burn victim. The nurse slathered this silvery paste called Silvadene all over the wounds. This miraculous cream prevented scabs from forming and the healing process was faster than leaving the wounds to dry out. This was a huge benefit but it had one major drawback. Throbbing pain at the wound sites that could only be alleviated by Vitamin V (vicodin) at regular intervals. The cream caused the body to send blood to the wounds en masse which caused more pain that was compounded by impacting the street at 35 mph. Once at home I was incredibly uncomfortable and had to take a week off of work. Bored out of my mind I decided to figure out how to build a website. We had recently purchased a PC computer with a printer. It was pretty sweet and had some RAM and a nice wired mouse. Not knowing how the WWW worked I poked around and found a free website host and a tutorial on learning HTML. With plenty of free time I was able to spend the week making a horrible looking website with a few paragraphs of my outlook on life at the time. So where did this go and why is it relevant now? Learning to code that bad website led to a job just 2 years later at a search engine which led to a job I had for 23 years whereby I learned more HTML, CSS, MySQL, Javascript, and PHP. I've looked back at the crash many times and replayed it in my head and it is what it is, a memory of a calamitous moment that caused a lot of sleepless nights and a damaged bike. I'm now no longer in the coding world professionally, just this amateur newsletter and my drone website (shameless plug AvilaDigitalMedia.com), and that my friends is my tale that circled back to bicycles and working at a bike shop. Keep the shiny side up and have a great week.

Peace,
Paul