I’ve become a master at the art of FDGB (Fall Down, Go Boom), a technique at which I’ve many years of practice.
If you think about it, there’s very little that keeps you in contact with terra firma on your bike. Those two skinny tires have a contact patch about the size of a credit card (even less if you’ve got those high performance jobs that get pumped up to a gazillion psi). All it takes is a bit of sand, wet leaf, badly placed crack in the road to send you in a direction you have no business going. At least here the idea is to maintain contact with the earth as opposed to cross country skiing where they put you on slippery snow and then put slippery stuff on the boards you have on your feet to make it even more slippery. But I digress.
So, it’s not all that surprising that the FDGB is a common occurrence in the life of a cyclist (some more common than others in my case).
Winter always brings opportunities for ice assisted FDGB’s. I have never gotten through a winter without at least one black ice or snow incident. One of my more dramatic ones was commuting to work, hit a patch of ice at speed and went careening into a snow bank for a fortunately soft landing.
Clipless pedals are a fertile source for FDGB’s. Almost everyone has what has come to be known as a “Clipless moment” when they first start using them. I should have had the need for corrective action before stopping ingrained in me from all my years of riding with toe clips, but I must confess, I never actually cinched up the toe straps. So, my first encounter with clipless pedals provided several opportunities to view the world from a horizontal perspective. Even after thousands of clipless miles under my belt, it just took coming to a stop leaning a bit the wrong way to execute the Arty Johnson maneuver (anyone remember “Laugh In”), as I did at start of the 200K brevet where I managed public humiliation when clipped in with my left foot, I leaned the wrong way and did a spontaneous FDBG.
One of my more spectacular gaffes was on a century ride years ago. I was in hot pursuit of a pack that had just left the rest stop, so I took my banana with me. After consuming said banana, I decided to fling it into the woods, so as not to litter. I know you engineers out there are already drawing vector diagrams and the like, but you can probably figure out this precipitated another unassisted FDGB.
Then there’s the tandem FDGB. Now one would think this would involve a double FDGB but this is not always the case. Several times we’ve hit loose dirt and the front wheel went sideways. The captain went down with the ship, but the ever vigilant stoker decided to bail (not being clipped in was a definite advantage in this case). Then there was the time I tried to execute a tandem u-turn (in my case, this usually doesn’t work out unless I have the space the size of a football field to maneuver), and we ended up on someone’s lawn. A soft landing, but this is always referred to in our household as the time I dropped Susan on her head.
So, the lesson is, be careful out there and keep the rubber side down.
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