"I toldja we shoulda taken the shorter route."

Remember this in February.

23 July 2016

See this contraption?

It came in the same day my back went out. It's called an inversion table. I lock my feet in, lie back, and go upside-down for a few minutes. It arrived on Monday. I assembled it late at night on Tuesday. I rode my bike into work on Wednesday and Thursday.

"It could be total confirmation bias," I told my doctor yesterday.

"No. You stretched out and gave your disc room to pop back into place."

That it did, because today I did 61 miles in the heat with no pain anywhere at all -- a first in a very long time. 

This evening, as I finished hanging upside-down, Burnaby showed me the biggest benefit of the inversion table:

Anyway, enough about that. About today's ride:

Tom was on it. We started with eight. We finished with seven.  We are, apparently, very good at coincidence. And we can't even blame it on our carbon bikes because we were both using metal today.

One of our riders already had 23 miles under him, having taken Route 206 from Princeton. One can do that in the early hours of a Saturday morning. One would be looked at strangely by the assembled Insane Slug Posse, but one could do that. He asked if anyone would be able to give him a ride home at the end, just in case. I said I could.

It was already in the mid-80s when we pushed off from Mansfield. Tom had a 50-mile and a 60-mile route. We'd be able to make a decision 32 miles in about whether we wanted to be hot or to be hotter.

On Four Mile Road, I gave the finger to the Rutgers Pinelands Field Station, as is my tradition, and Plain Jim joined in.  Chris said, "Without that place you wouldn't be a doctor."

"Not without, Chris. In spite of." 

We stopped for water at the Ranger's Station in Lebanon State Forest (both Tom and I still call it that), and then somehow managed to get across Route 72 without being run over. Then came our decision point. A few people wanted to do the shorter route. A few people wanted to do the longer route. The rest didn't care. So we went left, heading for Tabernacle and 60 miles.

We stopped at Nixon's, where I could easily spend $100 on penny candy.

John bought a pickle, and we had lots of fun with that.

A few miles out, I asked the rider who had 23 extra miles how he was doing.  "Great," he said. "Why?"

"Just checking in," I said.

We were on Eayrestown Road in Lumberton when the crash happened. None of us knows what caused it. He went down and then dragged himself out of the middle of the road. Blake called 911. Jim inspected his bike. He eventually sat up. His right shoulder was bleeding through his jersey.

"I toldja we shoulda taken the shorter route," somebody said.  We were at 50 miles.

Jim ran him through a mental assessment, which he passed, in a slow, quiet voice that didn't sound like his normal self. The paramedics (big ups to the Lumberton Rescue Squad) checked him over; he refused any treatment. A policeman, to whom I explained, "We're a bunch of stubborn jerks," directed traffic around us.

He insisted that he could at least ride to the Olde World Bakery five miles away. At first he kept up with us, but very soon he began to lag. Jim stayed with him and I doubled back. Halfway to the bakery, we stopped again. He slowly dismounted and limped into the shade, where he called his wife and we gave her directions. He insisted on continuing to the bakery, so Jim stayed with him while the rest of us went ahead. I had time enough to fill out he accident report while we waited.

We left him there, looking dazed and waving us off.  He emailed me in the early evening to thank us for everything, and to say that he'd cleaned up, taken a nap, and was now in the phase where everything hurts. He wasn't planning to see a doctor; I suggested he might want to reconsider.

Of course, now that it's coming up on midnight, I'm wondering if one of us should have stayed with him at the bakery (at the time there didn't seem to be a reason to do that), or if there had been a road hazard none of us had seen, or whether, with 70 miles on him, he was feeling the heat more than he'd let on. Pride makes people stupid, but so does heat.

Several riders have told me that they'd noticed he hadn't seemed quite right before he fell, after I'd checked up on him.  I'm adding a new line to my pre-ride spiel:  If you see somebody acting unsafe or unusual, tell me right away.