I did some serious training for the Wausau race in early June. I'll do a report on that later and then link to it here. Training was going well, but I needed some better base mileage to keep the pace high throughout the entire race.
The solution: a road trip with Kathleen to Colorado to visit friends and train at elevation. Big miles in the car to get some big miles on the bike. We rode in Breck, in Aspen, and then in Boulder.
Riding back to where we were staying in Gunbarrel, just outside Boulder, we rounded a bend in the road. My coach Aaron led, I was in the middle, and Kathleen was on my wheel. A four-inch piece of metal blew out my front tire while we were doing about 30mph and I hit the dirty blacktop on my left side.
Kathleen flew over me and landed on her head. Aaron turned around to stop traffic (fortunately there was a break in the flow of cars), and Kathleen pulled me out of the road. I quickly regained my senses (though I was never unconscious), but Kathleen's condition deteriorated. The EMTs arrived in 3 minutes (no joke), and by the time they had Kathleen strapped to a backboard, I was able to stand.
Once at the hospital, Kathleen was diagnosed with a pneumomediastinum (and a separated shoulder, but that was to be expected). Basically, she had a pocket of air in the tissue of her neck and mediastinum caused by the rapid expulsion of air from her full lungs when she impacted the ground.
All I had was some serious road rash (the left side of my left leg, hip to ankle) and eventual swelling. Some of the most astounding pain I've ever been in was experienced while scrubbing out my road rash in a hotel in Boulder.
So we packed it up, packed it in, and drove back to Wisconsin. I didn't ride a bike for two months.
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