June 1999

A beautiful summer day, perfect to take the bike out and go for a training. I used to do that almost every day in summer, to keep the shape up and to keep the right feeling with the bike. Through the woods where I lived. It was a great place to do a training and it helped me a great deal to get so far in BMX.
The forest where I did the training in was located on a hill. There were wooden steps for pedestrians going down on all sides and they were just perfect to race down and jump a bit. I knew every single step, every single low-hanging branche and every single treetrunk that was sticking out like my own inside pocket and it was great fun to always speed up down the steps and especially in the end to take a big jump to show off a bit for the kids there and for the people passing by.
This particular day wasn't much different from all the other times that I went, only it had rained quite a lot the night before, so the ground was quite wet still. But I didn't care a bit. I'd feel like a little kid when I would race down and feel the mud splash on my legs, back and in my face.
Anyway... I came down the steps doing some 40 kms per hour, not too fast since the wet sand was sucking up most of my speed and I estimated already the distance for that final jump. Only... what I didn't see was that the rain had washed away a lot of sand and it had uncovered a big root of a tree that didn't used to be there like that. So just before I wanted to pull up the bike for the last jump my front tire hit that root and I flew over the bike and landed some 8 meters and three steps further down, pretty hard, immediately followed by the bike.
As much as I'd usually wanted people to see me jump, the little I now wanted people to see me crash, so the first thing I did was look around if anyone was looking or had seen me crash. And of course, if you WANT people to see you, there's no one around looking at you and if you DON'T want people to see you there's always some people around. Also now.
There were some kids standing there with there bikes and all of a sudden they saw someone come flying out of the woods. It looked pretty spectacular obviously, because they were "WOW"-ing quite loud (I was happy about that, I mean, they also could've start laughing in my face and that would've been really annoying).
There was also an older couple walking by. The lady clasped her hand over her mouth, quite shocked. By that time I already got up and got to my bike (which, for as long as I can remember, has been the first thing I do after crashing: checking if my bike is still ok; do that even before checking if I myself was ok). I was wondering what could've been so shocking. They came a bit later, so they couldn't possibly have seen me flying out from the woods. But when they came closer and I noticed that she wasn't looking like people usually look at someone who fell. Her eyes were focused on my leg. I was wearing shorts, so the first thing that came up in my mind was that I ripped the shorts and I had some kind of big hole in my pants and that she would have a clear view on my ass (now THAT's shocking *g*).
But when I checked I saw that that wasn't quite the case. When I landed after my flight from the woods I'd landed in a branche and the branch was still sticking out of my leg. It was bleeding rather bad, since the whole side of my leg was red and that looked pretty disgusting. The lady came to me and asked if I was ok and of course I told her I was, which wasn't even a lie, since I hadn't even noticed the branche sticking out of my leg, but I'm not sure if she believed it.
I casually pulled the branche out of my leg and got on the bike (which was also completely ok) and rode home quickly to clean up the mess.
When I looked back before disappearing back into the woods, I saw the lady shake her head, as in saying "Children....".