failing like never before

I finally used a Target giftcard that I got for Christmas last year. I bought myself a Schwinn twelve-function bicycle computer, that can (amongst other things) tell me my current speed, average speed, maximum speed, distance traveled, and time traveled. So its quite the useful little device. I also bought myself some Franklin batting gloves, not for basebell mind you, (I don't play baseball) but for riding, because I've found that my hands tend to get amazinlgy cold when I'm riding and I couldn't find any riding gloves that covered a person's entire hand.

But back to the writhing in agony part, I took a longer ride today, just to see test my physical condition and to give my new Schwinn bike computer a test. As I was crusing along on my mountain bike at a solid 17 MPH, a bee hit me dead center in the forehead (or rather, I hit the bee). I stopped pedaling immediately, started to probe my forehead with my gloved fingers and discovered that the bee was still stuck to my forehead. Ow...

But since there was no way for me to safely remove the bee from my forehead with gloved hands, I grabbed my brake levers and slammed to a halt, intending to remove my gloves so that I could get rid of my new insect friend. I was perhaps a little too enthusiastic with the brakes and and the front wheel locked up, so that I was thrown foward. It would have almost been better for me to have flipped right over the handlebars, but instead I slammed my crotch into the solid metal headset. Sheer brilliance.

At this point, I stumbled out of my toe clips and collapsed on the side of the road writhing in agony, and it took a few seconds before I was able to extricate the bee from my forehead. Pretty sure people were staring at me, and I can't really blame them. Its not often you see a man laying on the side of a bike path, trying to clutch at both his forehead and pelvis region at the same time, all the while muttering incoherent curses.

Once the pain started to fade (which took a long time), I turned my mountain bike around and headed for home at a much slower pace. My stats for this ride where:

Distance traveled: 38.372 miles

Max speed: 33.5 MPH (I was going downhill of course.)

Average speed: 14.6 MPH

Elapsed time: 2 hours and 38 minutes