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With injuring my knee and rain through most of the week, I haven’t been able to go for a bike ride in a while. So, after washing my bike off and checking the wheels over for damage^† I headed towards Shelby Township’s River Bends Park. After stopping at the post office to ship a package I headed into the park and ended up doing two laps of the two track-type trail there. Normally I would have also continued along the paved path to Ryan Road, but the recent rains had the paved path under more than a foot of water, and I wasn’t in the mood to get wet. Both the bike and I got a bit muddy, but nothing terrible.

While on the unpaved tracks I ended up riding down anything that looked remotely like single track that went somewhere and ended up getting a much better feel for the land around there. The more I think about it, the more I think that River Bends could host a couple miles of nice single track.

The photo above was taken after I rode through some of the existing single track-like stuff, all the way to the far southeast corner of the park, where it goes down a ridge to the river’s floodplain. What is normally some trail for another 200′ was completely under actively flowing water. Looking towards the river showed what is above, with newly downed trees and a logjam. I love looking at this sort of transient river.

Also, during the whole time I was riding my knee had no problems. It’s still a bit sore at times, but all the aching seems to be coming from the outside of my kneecap in the area where the wound is still healing. This is good, I think.

^† Interestingly, I’d somehow fitted both tires backwards last time. I also found that while falling I managed to get a whole bunch of dirt between the bead of the tire and the rim’s bead seat, leading to a bit of a wobble in the tire. The wheels themselves are fine.

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Today was a very, very fortunate day to unexpectedly acquire a bottle of veterinarian-grade cyanoacrylate adhesive meant for tissue. While out at Addison Oaks riding the single track mountain bike trails with some friends, I had a rather slow speed fall, hit my knee on a screw hole on the side of the stem, and scooped a chunk of skin out the very front of my knee. After falling I was looking at my knee, and sliding the skin on it side to side showed something very light colored beneath that did not move with the skin. That photo up above is the chunk of skin in the screw hole.

It didn’t hurt very much, so after a minute or two I was able to stand up and ride the couple miles out of the park and back to the school we had all met up at. Thankfully there were a bunch of good people there, which would have been even better had I been more hurt.

By the time I drove home there were four distinct paths of dried blood down my leg, so I set to washing them off, cleaning the wound, and getting ready to glue it shut. After washing it I found that the hole seemed to have begun closing up, so I patted it dry, applied a drop of the clear blue adhesive to the surface, then worked the skin a bit to open and close the hole and let it stick shut. This worked, as it’s now now nicely stuck shut and no longer bleeding.

My knee is a bit swollen and still hurts a bit, but I think it just needs some time. The swollen area is the skin on top of my knee, and the pain doesn’t appear to be joint related. There’s the surface sting from the hole, and a bit of muscle-ish pain when I bend my leg into certain positions or go down stairs, but nothing that happens when I simply move my leg.

Here’s some photos from today, if you’re curious. Be forewarned, some of these might bother those who don’t like blood:

· Chunk of skin, still in a screw hole on the stem of my bike. This happened during a relatively low speed crash at Addison Oaks.
· Blood running down my leg after riding from Addison Oaks back to the nearby school.
· Greater detail of the blood coming out of my leg. The thickly scabbed, oozing part near the top is the injured part. Everything else was just dried / oozed blood.
· Chunk of skin which had been removed from my knee and then picked out of the stem.
· Detail of my knee after washing it and applying a veterinary-grade cyanoacrylate glue to close the wound.
· After a few minutes the cyanoacrylate glue did its job and closed up the wound.

(Oh, and if you’re wondering how I fell, here’s what happened: Right at an area that transitions from some wider trail to some narrow stuff, a branch was leaning down across the trail, covering everything above 5′ off the ground with leaves. I thought I could see well enough through it so I ducked and entered the leaves. However, right after getting through them I saw that the trail turned more than I’d expected, and my the very quick turn I made caused my front wheel to lose traction.

As most anyone who rides a bike regularly, a front wheel sliding in anything other than the direction it is pointing often means a rapid fall, which is what I did. The problem was that when going down I banged my knee on a screw hole on the stem, which acted as a melonballer and cut out this nice chunk.)

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