When I was in Year 12 (well, in fact through most of high school) I rode my bike to school everyday. We probably lived 2 or 3 kms from school - not that far, but far enough to make it a good ride. Anyway, I would ride everyday, and then when I had "free periods" (sanctioned or otherwise) or lunchtime, we (me and sometimes a few others) would take off somewhere. We'd ride to play basketball somewhere, or go somewhere for lunch (a takeaway shop), or sometimes back to my place to hang out / play computer games on my blindingly fast 386, etc. One day Adam (my best friend through high school) and I went back home for a bit, then realised we needed to be back at school in a short amount of time (imagine 10 minutes and it took 15 minutes to ride back to school). I locked the house, we jumped back on the bikes, and raced back to school. So, we're riding back like the wind, really hammering along. It's wet - not a solid rain, but wet enough to make it shitty to ride in. When you've got glasses, riding in the rain isn't great. So, I had developed this (bad) habit of riding with my head down (oh, now we all see where this is going), so that the full force of the rain didn't hit my glasses, but rather the top of my head. Adam and I are about half way back to school, I'm looking up every now and then through the rain, and just when I'm about to look up again, I hear "Newy!" from Adam (a name I always fucking hated but tolerated from him. One of those "best friend" things I suppose). I look up just in time to see the back tray of a 2 tonne (?) truck in front of me. My fingers (whilst frantically squeezing the brakes) hit first, just scraping under the back tray of the truck. What really stopped me though was my rather broad chest hitting the rather broad back of the truck, pretty much smack on. I still remember bouncing off the back of the truck with such force it threw me off the bike and onto the ground. I vividly remember not being able to take air into my lungs - the result of the largest "winding" of my life. So, I just kinda lay there, kinda fucked up. The bike had kinda fucked itself up in sympathy as well (although I must admit it was still in pretty good shape). I was fine after a 15 minute spell of chilling out, lying on the footpath, in the rain.

Anyway, thought I'd share with you one of my (many) graceful biking outings. This was far from the worst of course. There was the time that I broke my leg in 3 places while the bike was STATIONARY. No, I'm not joking, but that's a story for another time.