I ran over my teammate today

So it's a great day when you can get off your bike and walk, knowing tomorrow, you have the ability to get back on and ride. Unbroken, but for your spirit.

Considering the recent wrist fracture our teammate Wendy has had, I cannot complain about a severely bruised hip, a little-bitty road rash on my elbows and waist and an egg on my inner right knee. The advil and Pinot are already helping me along. Unfortunately, Michelle had to make the dreaded hospital visit for some stitches to her knee. I think some of her knee skin is still on my 53 tooth chain-ring.

Church Creek: Women's Open Team Time Trial. All we had to do was finish to win. Even if one of us got a flat, just two had to finish....

15km from the finish, Sonja riding in the front hit the lip (1 inch drop) on the surface of the road and with the skinny tires on a TT bike and less ability to maneuver to stay upright, it was a slide onto her left shoulder as she slammed into the paved road. Michelle, second in line, and an inch from Sonja's wheel, hit the pavement next. She likely would have survived more unscathed, but for me, third in line, on aero bars, an inch behind in her draft. I recall hearing screaming, some carbon scraping, and then watching in slow-motion as I rode over Sonja's new Specialized TT bike (on loan from Chicken, sorry Chicken!) and those nice wheels. It hurt me to ride over those wheels, in the half-second my brain thought about it, before it hurt more to fly my Specialized ass over handlebars onto the black sticky-tar road.

Big thanks to Michelle from All American Bicycle Club (?) who scooped me up from the burning pavement to place me in the grass. More thanks to the local couple driving by in a large pickup truck who picked us all up and put our three bikes and Sonja and me in the back of their truck bed. There was a lot of blood in this truck bed. Not ours. It was deer blood, some guts, and smatterings of deer hair...and a big trash bag of beer bottles, which I grasped onto so it wouldn't fly out into the road as the couple carted the three of us back to the school and our cars.

We tried to think of a cool story.

Yeah, we were out there pacing at 27mph and all of sudden these three deer darted across the road and took us out. Yeah, that's what happened. You think we look rough? You should have seen the deer.

You'll note my chain ring tracks on Michelle's skinsuit. Unfortunately, I left a chain-ring tattoo running from her torso straight down to her knee... (see above picture) ; (