6. Write about a time you fell down.

During the first few months of Covid – and especially during the lockdown – my family rode their bikes A LOT. I mean, it was our thing. Actually, my daughter couldn’t really ride very well until then; then she picked it up in about five minutes! That was when we began taking rides every day, just to get out of the house. We rode about two miles to start, then worked quickly up to three, four. Ash sometimes took just the kids and they went four or five miles in the neighborhood.

I thought I wrote about this incident but I was just out of the blogging habit while Covid was happening. Well, we took a long bike ride, probably seven miles. Instead of turning around at Pimlico and coming back, we turned into Killearn Acres and quickly found that they don’t have sidewalks after a certain point. We had to ride single file along the side of the road, which I would say is fairly well-traveled since a lot of folks live over there. Well, we were coming down a little bit of a hill towards a stop sign and suddenly, I look up and see that my daughter has stopped fairly short of the other three and the stop sign. Instead of veering out into the road or hitting her, I put the brakes on and went over my handlebars! In fact, I think the bicycle sort of reared up like a horse and then fell over. Not entirely sure but I landed on my thigh on the pavement. I smashed my phone, which was in a handle bar case, and my sunglasses.

A Fed-ex truck stopped to ask if I was ok but at that point, I was so pumped full of adrenaline that I did think I was ok. But then I realized I wasn’t. I’d landed awkwardly on my leg and from my hip to my knee I had this horrific bruise/scrape thing that took weeks to heal. My one elbow was scraped up pretty bad and everything ached. We still had about three miles to ride back and I just took it slow. In the following weeks, I avoided the bike altogether. And when I built up courage to get back on, it was nerve-wracking. I kept worrying that I no longer had control of the contraption and it felt entirely foreign. I don’t even know how that happened; riding a bike seems like something you always have in your repertoire of knowledge but I felt like I no longer knew what I was doing!

We rode not too long ago and I seem to have mostly gotten over my fear, though certain turns give me pause and my husband will ask “Are you still upset about that time you fell?”