WOW - Has this happened to anyone

That hasn’t happened to me, but I did have a rather odd (and somewhat spectacular) crash about 13 years ago.

I was riding down some smooth singletrack below some power lines at a good clip for a slight downhill; probably about 18mph. Quite abruptly, I found myself going over the bars, but this was different than the normal trip over the bars: the bike wasn’t coming with me. It was more like I found myself doing a Superman through the air.

As I started to pick myself up a little confused but unhurt from the ejection I’d just suffered, I started trying to piece together what happened. My clues: a stick and a skid mark.

On one side of the trail sat my bike – right about where it kicked me off. On the other side of the trail was a y-shaped stick about 16” long. On the trail between the two was a skid mark, about 18” long, leading up to a root that was crossing the trail.

I’m sure the odds on this happening were far worse than a million to one. As I rode down the trail, something, perhaps my front wheel, caused the y-shaped stick to flip up and become lodged between my downtube and the trail (the ‘y’ end straddled the downtube while the single end stuck in the ground). The stick was perfectly happy to go along for the ride, slowing me imperceptibly, until, of course, it met the root. Because of the length of the stick, when it caught the root it suddenly stopped my bike’s forward momentum and turned it into rotation. My body’s momentum, however, was left for the ground to deal with a brief moment later.

-Pete