busy-ness kept me from skating monday or tuesday. wednesday i had my skates on an was ready to go when a thunderstorm started. thursday was glorious! for about two weeks i’ve been working at beal bank in plano texas so i’ve been skating on trails there after work.
plano has invested heavily in a very well-developed system of paved off-street trails. their policy statement (pdf) on bicycle traffic could be used as a model for a lot of towns, btw. the “bluebonnet trail” runs east-west under main electric power lines. older sections are 6 feet wide and newer ones are 8. there are various places where north-south trails cross it, especially the “preston ridge trail” and the “chisolm trail”. they’re intended for bicycle comuting, as well as recreational use. the only major down side is street crossings. most places the cycle trails cross a street there isn’t even a crosswalk marked. in the places where they’re marked and signed, motorists routinely ignor them. on many sections of the trails i skate for a quarter mile, then wait for traffic for a minute. then cross the street and do it again. quite annoying.
i’ve been starting on the preston ridge trail at legacy. i go south to catch the bluebonnet trail, then east until just past the plano dog park. then i take the chisolm trail southeast to 15th street, coming out at 15th and central right behind an “on the border” restaurant. it’s only 13.25 miles there and back, but takes me about an hour and 10 because of the many stops (i should count the stops next time).
the paving varies a lot along the way. some places are good, some are rough or irregular. most have sidewalk-style expansion grooves every 6 or 8 feet. many of the on-off ramps for street crossings have bumps that bicycles will barely feel, but which could kill a skater. the chisolm trail section is the best about going under the streets since it follows a creek so they needed bridges anyway.
the very smoothest, flattest section of concrete is the L-shaped ball park parking lot east of the plano recreation center. the expansion grooves are small and are spaced like normal street paving. it’s about a half-mile of pure bliss.
usually it is.
thursday, i was on the return side of my first lap and was cruising. it was just after 7:00 in the evening and had started to cool down. i was taking those long, hard pushes that seem so powerful on the smooth flat concrete. i felt great! i was going two laps for sure and was considering three if i had enough sunlight. i’d just turned north and was skating parallel beside the rec center. my left foot was under me on the outside edge of a double-push.
and SPLAT!
there was a place at an expansion joint that the paving had started to fail. the color of paving is different on the two sides, so probably the crew that laid the road had left off one day and started the next. there’s an 18 inch semicircle on one side where the concrete has collapsed by about an inch and a half. if i’d been watching at all, instead of daydreaming about how good i felt, i’d have skated just to the side of it with no problem.
as it was, my left foot caught that inch and a half ledge and i went down immediately. no time for thought like the slow-motion memories of a car wreck. this was sub-second, from probably 20 miles an hour to zero.
i strawberried my left leg, caught just a tiny bit of my right elbow, hit hard enough on my chest to knock the wind out of me, and (most noticably) caught the bottom of my chin. the blood from my chin mixed with sweat and dripped right down my neck and the center of my chest to my belly button.
a parks department employee was following me in his pickup and stopped to offer some starbucks napkins for the bleeding. he kept asking if i was ok and i kept telling him i didn’t know. i was in shock and was trying to catch my breath from the chest-slam so it took a bit before i could inventory for anything broken. after a few minutes i decided i would live and thanked the parks department guy and a walker who’d stopped to help.
i skated back to the trucklet and checked my chin in the rear-view mirror. the bleeding had slowed to an ooze. i thought about getting in a hot vehicle, sore everywhere and covered in sweat, and driving home. i thought about how few miles i had this week. i checked my skates – i’d lost some leather on both, especially the outside toe edge of the left one, but the frames were still firm.
…so i did another lap
26.5 miles today
26.5 miles this week
787.5 miles YTD
178.4.2 lbs
about
