My weekend

So this morning a friend asked me how my weekend went. She was asking about my Ride for Heart in Toronto. What could I say but, “it was a weekend I won’t soon forget.” It was awesome. The weather was terrific.With a lot of help from our friends and family we raised scads of money for heart and stroke research and I was with two great people, LOML and our youngest son—plus about 20,000 other cyclists.

Is that all? Well, not quite. After all, the city of Toronto does close two of its busiest expressways for the ride and that alone makes up half the fun-cycling across the Gardiner Expressway, down into the Don Valley and up to York Mills Road and back. For a cyclist it’s great fun and great purpose.This year I have been working hard on my fitness and at the 45-km mark was already 25 minutes faster than last year— thank you JB and PB. And then the real fun began.

Have you ever watched a slowmotion event about to happen? You can see a disaster in the making and you can’t do anything to stop the film rolling. That was Sunday just past the Yonge Street exit on the Gardiner Expressway with only a few kilometres to go. I could only watch as the cyclist next to me pulled ahead and swerved into my front wheel. There ain’t no recovering from that kind of impact.

Here’s the part where I tell idiots who don’t wear bike helmets to freakin’ smarten up (in particular Sherry O.)….Smarten up and wear a helmet no matter how short your ride might be or how skilled a rider you think you are because the first thing to hit the hard and unforgiving pavement is your head. You should see my brain-bucket— smacked up good and now garbage.Yup, so head first with a sickening thud and then my used-to-be-good shoulder.

There are a lot of sounds in life that evoke memories.The crack of my helmet on the asphalt. The heavy metallic clunk of my sweetheart Marin Kenfield and the keee-rack of bones as they do what bones do when pressed to their limit. Argh.

As my friend Linda has said, “Tee, you always land face first in the shit pile.”

Indeed, I think I did. Broken me and my busted ride landed in front of one of the emergency medical teams. “Would you like an ambulance with those fractures?” Now if that isn’t part of a great day, I don’t know what is! I managed to get up and out of the way.

So, LOML and youngest son finished the ride: LOML on his bike so he could get the car and meet me at the hospital; and youngest son finished, with my bike, in the sweeper. I finished my Ride for Heart in the back of an ambulance wearing a sling and a blood pressure monitor, chewing on a thermometer with a blood-oxygen thingy on my swollen finger.

From pavement to emergency room: 20 minutes. From triage to x-ray to diagnosis of broken collarbone to reassembly of slight dislocation to bandages to state-of-the-art sling/immobilizer to printout of records and a pleasant chat with the handsome records clerk who showed me the National Post story about Prince Edward County and a brief chat about his family cottage at Lake on the Mountain (whew)-one hour and 40 minutes. I was back on the street before the paramedic had finished his reporting with a promise he’d visit the County for the beach, the beverages and the bad-assed food.

The other guy? Oh ya, the other guy. On our way home we stopped for a drink at Port Hope. I must have been a sight—road rash, bruises starting to bloom and gear grease up my leg and on my arms, with a soupçon of dust on my face. A young guy asked me what the other guy looked like, and all I could do was smile and say the other guy didn’t even stick around long enough to see how I was. The other guy actually had to lift my front wheel off his, before he took off. Maybe he was scared—I don’t think I held back on the “kudos” regarding his stellar cycling skills. I have, after all, no internal editor.

It was a greet weekend, thank you very much. Getting dressed, eating, brushing and flossing are new challenges. Ed is giving my bike the love it needs and, speaking of love, LOML is in charge of cooking and getting the tangles out of my mane. Funny, but great too. And, the last time I had been in St. Mike’s Hospital was the day I was born, although I don’t think I was delivered by ambulance. How often do ya get to brag about that?