It’s official, I’ve suffered my first injury of my young biking career. 

After going with Suraj to buy his bike at Gregg’s in Green Lake, we started off on the Burke-Gilman trail from Fremont riding towards Ballard at about 5pm. After only about a mile, we hit a section of road with railroad tracks that were flush with the road surface.  We’re riding along and I’m thinking:

“I wonder why they have the bike path going in between railroad tracks? Seems dangerous.”

I’m going at a good pace (about 18-20mph) and the next think you know it, my front wheel catches the track, falls into a grove and I’m tossed off the bike onto the bare pavement. Ouch. 

There I was, sitting on the side of the road in a ton of pain, assessing my injuring with Suraj by my side. While we’re sitting there, we hear a loud crash and look over and see another guy just do the exact thing I did.  It’s bad to say this, but it made me feel a bit better about myself that this dude totally took a dive since he looked like he was a pro biker — if it could happen to him, then I didn’t feel so bad for bailing

Let me tell you, road rash is never good.  My knee was scraped pretty good, along with my hip, ankle and shoulder.  Luckily I had a small towel with me so I could try to stop the blood from gushing out of my knee.  While we’re sitting there, we look around on the ground and see that the road has the words “No bikes” painted exactly where we were riding.  Too bad this warning sign was completely faded and extremely hard to read.   Damn city roads!

I couldn’t get the bleeding to stop so we headed back to my car so I could head home to treat it with some antiseptic and such. Once I got home, all the fun started.  It was bad enough to take my initial spill, but picking out gravel from an exposed wound with tweezers almost made me want to pass out.  I had to pull out the hydrogen peroxide, tweezers and webmd.com even recommended using the sprayer from my kitchen sink to help clean the wound and gravel out.  Yikes.

Train tracks = 1.

Trevin = 0.