By Monte Wehrkamp

I ran up  – if you can call it that, as I was wearing my road cycling shoes at the time – to a tangled pile of pretty tan legs sticking through a gleaming white bicycle frame; the bike’s rear wheel was still slowly spinning: tick-tick-tick-tick. As I clattered to a stop, I heard a soft groan.

Reaching down, I moved legs one way and the bicycle the other and slowly extracted my wife from her brand new Cannondale Synapse road bike.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I forgot! Damnit!” she responded, her eyes welling up with tears.

I could see then the blood starting to ooze from her scraped knee. And her side was covered with road grit. I reached down, took her hand.

“Do not cry. No crying,” I ordered.

As I pulled her up, the look she shot me was one filled with the kind of meaning and nuance saved especially for spouses. At first, her eyes flashed anger. At me. So at least she wasn’t crying. The next few seconds were defiance. I’ll cry if I damn well want to. Then pain. And a few silent tears welled up.

She rose carefully to her feet. Nothing appeared to be seriously hurt.

“My hip,” she said as she took a step.

Uh oh. She’s tiny, with small bones. Having broken my own hip 15 years ago, my heart skipped a beat. Please don’t be hurt, I thought. She peeled her bike shorts down a little and I looked. There was already the beginning of an angry blue-black-yellow bruise forming. She raised her leg, bent her knee, then twisted her torso a little. Whew, so far, so good. I noticed her elbow then. It had angry, red roadrash on it.

“You want to ride home, or just push it back?” I asked, knowing our day was done.

“Push,” she said, tearing up but not crying. And so ended her first day of road biking – her first day on her new Cannondale – with each of us pushing our bikes home from the culdesac 100 yards from our house.

—–

We started out that day – a bright late summer morning – with Linda in her Pearl Izumi kit, wearing her favorite Sugar Shorts so she could work on her tan. She was also wearing a good deal of apprehension because of, well, pedals.

Remember your first time going clipless? Figuring out how to take off, snap in, then accelerate away? Or coasting up to a stoplight, twisting your heel and snapping out, like Dorothy clicking her heels? And that terrible, helpless feeling, knowing your feet are still locked to your pedals, and the ground is coming up fast?

Yeah. Me too.

We’ve all done it. We’ve all forgotten to clip out and tipped over, gotten up, looked around to see if anyone saw (our pride suffering the most damage). Or missed a clip-in during a take-off and gone for a spill. And then there’s the one when you’ve overridden your abilities, and found yourself in a situation where there’s no time to click out before a fall or crash.

It sucks. It happens. But that’s the price we pay for a fluid, efficient, and powerful pedal stroke. You just can’t climb, accelerate or handle your bike quite as well when you’re on flat pedals. Wish we could, but we can’t.

I also wish you could have seen her. We were in the culdesac, just practicing stops and starts. Linda was doing very well. Braking, slowing, unclipping, putting her foot down, stopping. Perfect! Then moving the clipped-in foot up, pushing down, picking up her ground foot, finding the pedal, pressing down, feeling the click. Good! I stopped riding beside her and watched her repeating the stop and go’s at her own pace. Cycling goddess. Long blonde hair flowing out of her helmet, her strong, lean body sporting pro kit, piloting her 3-day old carbon road bike. I thought, “How freaking cool is th…”

Then it happened.

She’d come to a safe stop, had her foot down, was turning to say something to me, then like a tree being felled by a logger, slowly, then quickly picking up speed, tipped over. Bam!

As we pushed our bikes home, she explained what happened in greater detail. She’d stopped fine. Her left foot was down and she was balanced. Perfectly in control. She decided she wanted to turn the other way and just forgot she couldn’t simply put her clipped-in foot down (like she might have if she’d been riding her old Giant hybrid bike). She just leaned from left to right and only realized as she began to fall that she wasn’t going to get her right foot out in time.

“I’m such an idiot,” Dr Linda said, rubbing her sore hip and limping on her aching knee.

But I assured her (as I’m assuring you, dear reader) she’s no idiot. She’s a bike rider now. She experienced her first fall and saw first-hand the rules we cyclists live by, as spelled out by the Universal and Unbreakable Laws of Gravity.  Thankfully, it was gentle, as most crashes go. Regardless, the bruise on her hip grew to a four-inch green-black reminder that it’s best to clip out both feet if one intends to move around much while stationary on

Indoor practice makes perfect.

the bike. And the scrape on her knee took a full month to heal. Her bike is now on the trainer in the living room (next to mine) and is now equipped with new pedals (touring flats on one side, SPD clips on the other — she can practice clipped in her Giro bike shoes while she spins, then as we ease back onto the road, she can gain confidence riding on the flat side with gym shoes).

In retrospect, that day was a pretty big one. Her first blood to the cycling gods. I pray this was her one and only offering.

(Now’s a good time for anyone who’s gone down, thanks to their pedals, to tell their story in the comments section below. As I told Linda both before and after her spill, it happens to everyone at one time or another. Part of the learning process. Let Linda know she’s not alone.)