CRASH! (again)

 Have you heard of Strava?  It is the Facebook for bike riding, essentially.  A lot of people ride with a GPS enabled computer (or at least carry a smartphone), which means you after your ride you can upload your history to Strava.  You can then see how you did compared to other people on the same sections ("segments") of the ride.  This allows you to compete even when you are alone.  And if you pay an entry fee, they will let you filter the results down by age, weight, skill level, whether the sun was out, what you had for breakfast, etc - so everyone can be a winner.

In any case, Strava is just catching on in the Okanagan.  Caroline is also quite quick on her bike, and the combination has resulted in about 150 QOM results (Queen of Mountain, or the fastest girl on a segment). Unfortunately, a slightly faster girl recently took away a few of Caroline's QOM's.  This could not be allowed  to stand, so on this weeks Sunday Ride, we tried to get them back.  The game plan was for me to pace Caroline up the sections of steady incline. This we also expected to get the group as a whole moving faster as they chased me down, which would create a nice big draft to help Caroline along.

This is not cheating, by the way.  Everyone does it.

The game plan was NOT for Caroline to rub wheels with me, which would likely send her off the side of the road and into a manicured rock garden.  This would be a bad plan because her front wheel would likely dig in, and if that happened, she would probably go over the bars and take most of the impact with her shoulder on a big rock.

Evidently, we need to review game plans in more detail.

 (it is unfortunate we are not in America.  I hear that people down there are currently suing Strava for essentially "making them go too fast" when they are pursuing KOM's, which has resulted in injuries when they then fall off of their bikes. It seems logical to blame Strava to me, too)

It took a few minutes of recovery, but she is fine.  She ended up riding another 20km before heading home, so it can't be that bad.

The upside to riding with a computer to chase QOM's is being able to watch your heart rate as you crash your bike:

One guess as to where the crash happened.  Kind of scary, huh?

Normally, my first priority would have been to take a picture of the accident scene.  Unfortunately, the whole group stopped to make sure she was OK, which made me feel that taking out a phone would have been a little crass.  The best we can do is a picture of the most affected arm on the day after:

(if that isn't a beautifully composed picture, I don't know what is)

All in all, it turned out to be a fairly eventful and busy weekend.  Meanwhile, people on the internet were also having busy weekends (and creating interesting juxtapositions at the same time):