Biking is Hard...

Today was a little on the windy and chilly side, but I was determined to do something today that made me feel as if I accomplished something. My wife's bike is "in the shop"...the chain kept flying off the sprockets when she downshifted and the real kicker came yesterday when we tried to go on a biking excursion and her quick-release hub assembly flew apart. We put it back together, but every time you locked it, the lever flew apart from the assembly. Something stripped? We couldn't tell. But the conclusion was a trip back to the store the bike came from, 3 year service plan in hand, telling them it needed repair. They said they'd have their bike mechanic look at it today and call us when it was ready. No phone call today.

So I filled this afternoon first with more weed whacking...quite of bit of that done...then we took my bike and my son's "Hot Wheels" bike (a little bike with training wheels) to a local school to ride around. My son decided to take off without us, and we yelled to him to stop and wait. He stopped, giggled, and took off again. I jumped onto my saddle and took off after him, but I was too late. He failed to brake in time and rode right off the sidewalk, falling onto the pavement.

He seemed okay with a nagging soreness to his arm. We were sure it was a sprain. His grandparents were sure it was a sprain.

A few hours later we took him to the ER. It was a green stick fracture on both bones, mid-forearm. Not a complete snap, but enough to proclaim it a fracture.

Silver lining: he's four. The bones, he said, would heal right up as long as they don't take another hit that would complete the fracture, and they'll heal straight. He should be just fine, although right now he doesn't like the feel of the splint and in a few days he'll have a cast put on.

He'll be fine. Poor little guy.

All of this after scouring the web for information on some sort of a "good" place to try riding. Long story short: good luck finding some. It's hard enough for adults to find a place to ride that wasn't in the road. To ride with a four year old on training wheels? The local school was the closest we could find to being a safe place to try riding. So much for that theory.

Society just doesn't seem to place importance on exercise outside of walking and fitness centers. Biking was a good, practical way to get some more exercise and yet it's relegated to having practitioners roll the dice and take their chances with getting hit by cars or have to use stationary equipment in gyms or basement workout corners.

That. Sucks.

Especially for noobs like me who are too out of shape to really ride on the roads or people, again like me, who have young kids who also want to try riding on a bike. Well, used to. I don't know if my little guy will want to ride for awhile after this incident.