Swing Batter, Swing

So I’m on the road last night with about five minutes left in my usual weekday training ride. You know how it is: you’re not far from home and the road is relatively quiet so why not stand up and blast out a few sprints before you pull the throttle down to idle and cool down the engines? That’s exactly what I started doing and in the middle of the second sprint while approaching a wide-open intersection, I spotted a mid-sized SUV nearing the STOP sign to my right. No need to push my luck, I thought, taking my foot off the gas.

Thank god I did. If not, I would have ended up as road kill last night. The driver happened to reach the STOP sign on the right—I had neither a STOP sign nor any type of signal—a moment before I did and apparently, she missed the blinking headlight on my handlebars. Apparently, even while under the street lights, she missed every piece of reflective clothing on my body and decided to go for it, meaning she came within 2-3 feet of broad siding me straight into oblivion.

Now I know that every person laying eyes on this blog page has most likely spent a fair amount of time riding a bicycle and, if you haven’t, I’m sure you can relate. If you don’t ride, you’ve either seen cyclists get hit or snake through close calls, or you’ve almost hit a cyclist yourself, probably both. The reason I put the energy into describing the above, though, is not because almost getting murdered by a middle-aged woman behind the wheel of an SUV (most likely rushing to some parent-teacher conference . . . go ahead and call me sexist, I’m fine with that) is anything unique to me and my ride last night. The reason I mention what happened last night has to do with how such a close-call invariably causes one to fly into an uncontrollable rage.

When you’re driving along in your own SUV and someone almost blows through a STOP sign, it’s annoying, but with a few tons of metal surrounding your fragile personal frame, it never really seems like that big of a deal. Chances are you’ve got air bags to keep your pretty / handsome face from smashing into the steering wheel in the event of a head-on collision. You have disc brakes to stop all four wheels and more than enough rubber-to-asphalt surface area to get you stopped that much faster.

When you’re doing 35 MPH on tires less than an inch wide with wire-pull brakes and someone blows a STOP sign and your heart rate jumps to 210, we’re talking about a whole other ball game. Without that sturdy steel frame and air bags to keep you safe, some jackass in a SUV failing to take half a second to actually look for oncoming traffic no longer means a simple inconvenience settled with a finger poised in the air. When you’re on your bike, a sloppy driver could mean a nasty spill. It could mean road rash. It could mean a broken bone or a few broken bones. It could mean finding yourself without the ability to move your toes or your legs. It could mean a coma from which you never recover, or if the driver is really that much of an asshole, it could mean not only your last ride, but your last thought, your last day, your last minute, your last breath. It could mean never seeing you wife/husband/girlfriend/husband again. It could mean never seeing your kids again. It could mean that some irresponsible dipshit takes away every fucking thing you were looking forward to for the rest of your life whether you’re twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy-years-old.

And considering it only takes three-tenths of a second to realize how close you just came to losing everything, you get mad. You get madder than mad. Pardon the cliché, but you fly into something closely resembling an uncontrollable rage and, if you don’t, then you damn well should. And while I’m not advocating violence—only if you’re with a riding group you can trust—it never hurts to toss the offending driver a gratuitous verbal ass-beating just so he or she is aware of how much of a moron he or she actually is. It’s sort of like George Carlin says when discussing survival of the fittest: “The kid who swallows too many marbles deserves to die,” meaning the people who drive as bad as they do, they deserve a gratuitous verbal ass-beating at the very least.

Know what I’m saying?