Cool October night and riding for my new job First of all, it was a typically cool early evening in late October in Northern California. I was riding down a stretch of road I’d gone down so many times before. Right by my old job at the Walmart in Folsom, California coming home from the Mathnasium Learning Center where I’d just taken a new job tutoring young kids after school with their math skills.

If you’ve ever been to one of these learning centers, you know that they have a different approach to math and to learning. Anyway, the job paid more but it also required me to use my bike a lot more than I had needed to. The thing is, they had me riding between different learning centers within the county.

I worked at two that were the furthest out possible from major transit. One was in Folsom which was accessible by light rail and the other was in Granite Bay. Granite Bay is the 375th wealthiest zip code in the United States at the moment. It’s not the richest area in the US, but it’s definitely up there and it’s definitely among the wealthiest in the Sacramento area.

Traversing the many hills of the higher elevations in the Sacramento area The point is that Granite Bay is near some very hilly terrain and not so much near any major public transportation. The people that live there drive to and from everywhere. That’s mainly how I got my 25 miles in every day living in Rancho Cordova.

I was used to riding my bike everywhere I went. I could go to and from Folsom to Granite Bay to Rancho Cordova with ease, only utilizing public transportation when it was available or when I didn’t feel like riding through the hills. I got really strong from all of that riding and very confident too.

Overconfidence and multitasking led to a very tricky situation Some of these bad habits from getting overconfident on a bicycle came to bite me on that fateful day in October. I got so good at balancing myself and riding with ease that I started discovering that I could do a lot on my bike. It was about 9:00 pm the night I was riding near that hill just past the Walmart.

I was on the phone with my friend. I got to the part of the hill where it started really coasting downhill. I had good brakes and lights on my bike. I also had a helmet and a backpack on. All of these things are important because they kept me safe and two other things probably saved my life that night.

The top speed I could achieve on my bicycle cruising down that hill as I had so many times before was somewhere between 25–35 mph (40–55 kph). I was just under that speed as I was feeling the wind in my face going down a very desolate yet familiar stretch of road leading me down to my flat terrain to ride home to.

The car pulled out too fast and too far On that particular night though, it was not to be. I saw the flashes of an oncoming car that didn’t stop at the stop sign as it normally should. Since I had my phone in one hand and only one hand on my bicycle’s steering, I didn’t have the normal control that I would have had I not been trying to multitask.

I first lost control of my phone which decided to wobble as I was looking to disengage with it so I could grab my handlebars. The problem is, when you don’t have both hands on your brakes, you tend to be unable to pay attention to which ones are the front and the back brakes. I’m right-handed.

Had I been riding instead of trying to finish the conversation with my friend, I’d have been able to use my right hand to get my hand on the back brakes as I had been trained to do in these situations. Instead, I put my free hand on the brake. Unfortunately, that was my left hand.

Mistakes led to me flipping over my bike as I had flown off I’d just avoided slamming into the oncoming car, but because I’d engaged my front brakes downhill instead of my back brakes, I’d flipped over my front handlebars. The force and the momentum forced me forward and off of my bike at a speed unnatural to regular human activity. I’d started to almost fly off of my bike.

My phone naturally fell out of my hand and cracked on the sidewalk but surprisingly didn’t completely break. I think that my friend had heard this happen and knew that I had crashed. I must’ve called out to him and he knew where I was through all of the pandemonia.

I don’t know how long I was out necessarily. It could’ve been 15 or 30 minutes, or maybe an hour before I regained consciousness as the ambulance got me up off of the side of the road along with my bicycle. I had also seen my friend there as he came to retrieve me from the hospital after an hour's drive from Elk Grove to Folsom.

My friend picked me up and my face was ready for Halloween — but seriously I was never the same I was in so much pain and I had only sustained a mild concussion but had some pretty gnarly scars on my face ahead of Halloween, only two days away. I would definitely scare a few of my students at the math center and the college in the coming weeks.

After that, I wasn’t the same physically. I tried to continue to work and maintain my active lifestyle but because of my stupid mistake and the accident, I couldn’t bring myself mentally to ride my bike long distances anymore.

I think that my decision caused me to have PTSD on a bicycle. I still have a bicycle even though I haven’t really ridden one since then. Now that I’m medically disabled and unable to work, I think it’s even more unlikely that I’ll get back on a bicycle again.

So the reason I stopped riding and that my health started going on a physical down spiral was all because I got too overconfident and wasn’t paying attention. I’m not saying that it could happen to anyone. I’m sure that many of you would’ve been smarter than active, health-conscious, fit, ready to conquer the world, early-30 something Sturg.

The circumstances of my accident definitely could’ve been different and this could be any of you, especially the active 20 and 30-somethings. I guess you’d understand why at the age of 40 unable to work or enjoy my favorite active activity affects me so much. I loved riding my bike. I wish that I still could do it.

The aftermath and the lessons I lost my job at the learning center shortly after as I could no longer continue getting out to the Granite Bay center, and I started riding my bike a lot less. I could definitely sense that I wasn’t the same after that accident. When I’ve tried to ride since then, my arms lock up, get really sore and feel like they’re going to fall off.

I know some of this might be mental but a lot of it was definitely the physical fallout of flying off of my bike and leaving that accident with my life, even if that life is devoid of traveling by bicycle. I don’t mean to be a downer with this story. I just want to caution those who think that they can do it all and have it all to just treasure the moments they have because nothing lasts forever and tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.

The story about my accident was inspired by a fellow editor and friend, Anne Bonfert , and her story about people writing about traveling on their bicycles. The above story I just wrote was really hard for me to write because of how much it affected me but it was important for me to get the details out there to let others know.

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