While riding my bicycle home from community college, I casually turned my head to see something. Without looking where I was going, I smacked my head into a girder sticking out of the bed of a truck parked in a driveway I passed by. I wasn’t going breakneck speed, but I hit the girder hard (surprised it didn’t knock me out). The first thing that ran through my mind was “I just got hit in the head…I’m going to fall off my bike now”. The bike wobbled, I tottered on it…but remained upright! I was able to safely ride home, to inspect the bump on the side of my head. Anyone else have something like this happen?
Hey, they’re running a public-safety ad for bike helmets here that features just that scenario!
I’m glad you’re okay
Once when I was a kid, I went to a summer camp of sorts. A little girl and I had walked down to a creek that was below the cabin. At one point in the creek there was a waterfall. I have no idea how high the waterfall was, but being 7 years old, it seemed like 30 or 40 feet. Halfway down, right in the middle of the waterfall was a rock outcropping.
As the girl and I moved closer to the edge of the fall to closer inspect the drop-off, we noticed that the rocks of the creek bed were slimy with algae. Before I could step away from the edge, my feet went out from under me, and I found myself airborn. Here’s where the physics gods favored me. I did a complete backflip and landed square on my feet on the rock outcropping. There were some sharp stones on it, and it cut my 7-year-old feet to some extent, but I can’t imagine what they might have done to my 7-year-old skull.
That’s the point where your companion should have said “Wow, do that again!”
Glad you both got out of those scrapes with minimal damage, though.
Incubus, don’t you think you should go see a doctor? That smack in the head sounds serious.
I was riding my bike home one fine afternoon and was glancing off to the side instead of straight ahead as one should. I hit a large rock which stopped my bike dead… I went over the handlebars and without thinking did a tuck - somersalt - and made a ten point landing. I credit my reflexes to gymnastics and martial arts training.
A lady who was out in her garden came running over and said that my acrobatic manouver was amazing. My first thought was “what acrobatics?”
Well, I managed to simply let a bike slide out from me once when it decided it wasn’t going to complete this turn on wet blacktop. I put down one foot, lifted the other, and let the bike slide away, as I hopped forward to slow down.
Not THAT spectacular.
Wow. These stories are awesome, in the same way that watching a Buster Keaton movie (“Sherlock, Jr.” in particular) is awesome. Here’s mine:
It was 1992. I was in college, in Athens, GA. It was very late at night, and I’d been drinking all day, as is customary during the Twilight Criterium (fellow Athenians know what I mean). I had run into my cousin Clark at some point, and we were in The Roadhouse playing darts. We were TREMENDOUSLY drunk. Oh yeah, and I was wearing an old, extremely worn-out pair of Chuck Taylors (this is key).
So I threw a dart. It bounced off the board (or the wall or something), came straight and fast back at me, and went completely through my shoe and between my toes, not even scratching my skin. It was not until the next day, when I woke up with a suicidal hangover, that I appreciated the insane luck I’d had. (OK, it wouldn’t have killed me or anything, but it would have stuck me and hurt. And it was unlikely in the extreme.)
Also once, back when Cokes had those pull-off pop-tops, my sister threw a pop-top across the room at a trash can, only to have it hang itself neatly on a coatrack instead–which illustrates partly the amazing things random physics can do, and partly my sister’s terrible aim.
Anyway, my story was cooler; it had darts and beer. Then again, hers took place in Switzerland, so maybe hers is cooler.
Back in middle school a couple kids decided to pull that oh-so-fun old trick on me where one person gets on his hands and knees behind me and the other gives me a good shove on the chest to knock me over. Well, I went down, and whacked my skull on the corner of a 3-foot-tall metal roll-cart on the way down. The kids who knocked me over didn’t intend for that part to happen, evidently, as they looked horrified, like they’d just killed someone. For a brief instant I thought I was going to burst into tears, but then I realized I wasn’t really in much pain at all and stood up, laughing. Then the kids who knocked me over looked at me like I was a psycho. They calmed down once they realized I wasn’t hurt and they weren’t going to get in trouble, though. To this day I have no idea why that fall didn’t split my skull open, though.
A few years later I was riding my moped home around 1:00am (when the bars close) and I got hit by a pickup truck (which just kept on driving, the bastard). I was hit in such a way that I slid down the side of the truck and tipped over when I reached the back rather than being hit directly by the front of the truck, which probably would have killed me. I ended up lying in the middle of the road and my moped had skidded off to the side of the road. I stood up, checked myself for damage and found that I had none, aside from a few bits of scraped-up skin. Once again, I couldn’t beleive that I’d come out of that situation with nothing more than a few minor cuts. I walked my damaged moped the rest of the way home, my parents called the police, and that was that. I never did find out who hit me.