Learning to fly

...with limited success so far.

I should have known that the week wasn't going to go smoothly when I popped out for a bit of climbing on Sunday evening and promptly fell off a route I should have been able to do. Not too much beyond my pride was damaged because the gear kept me off the deck, although I have an interesting lattice of scabs on the inside of my arm which obviously scraped down the rock as I went. Then today when cycling to work I was turning into an tunnel-underpass only to meet a cyclist coming out of the tunnel on the wrong side of the cycle path. She tried to turn to get to the right side of path but only turned into my path. I hit the brakes as hard as I could, but as I was doing about 30-40 kpmh I couldn't keep my back wheel down and the next thing I knew I was in flight once again. Unlike Sunday, this time I was flying forward instead of downward and indeed managed to do a 360 in the air as I landed on my hip, thigh and shin - all of which have now a little bit less skin than they used to. The main thing I was thinking whilst sitting on the floor was how it was amazing that my neither my neck nor head had made any contact at all with the ground - so I told the now apologetic lady on the other bike that I was fine, got back on my bike and pedaled, slightly sorely, off to work. Only when I got to work did I find that my lovely iPod was smashed, and I had managed to land on my keys that had been in my thigh pocket, and that the funny round key that goes into the barrel of my bike lock, is no longer round - more egg shaped - and no longer fits in the lock. If it hadn't been for smashing the iPod I would have been proud to have flown that far and not got really hurt, but instead it was a shit start to shit day, spent dealing with shit at work not caused by me or my colleagues, whilst my leg and hip ached from the crash. So over all, a bit shit.