sprocket i/o

I had a minor offroad faceplant about a week ago now. Hopefully it’s my last. The following is based on my post from this advrider.com thread:

I was out riding in the Coopers Creek Wildlife Management Area outside of Suches, GA with my Bob, Jay, and David (all on advrider I believe, don’t recall their names). I was on my BMW F650GS Dakar, and they were on their BMW 1200GS’s. There was a side-trail that looked a bit gnarly, so I was asked to go ahead and scout it out to see if it was worth going down. About 50ft in, I saw a small log that I needed to hop the bike over. I’d only done this in the MSF Dirt Bike class, and it was easy enough. I got the front wheel up and over easily enough, but my rear began fishtailing. I’m pretty sure I got the rear off the log and back onto the trail, but I was still fishtailing pretty badly. I made the concsious thought to accellerate out of the problem, but I’m not sure I had time to execute it. I was thrown off the bike like superman. I landed on my forehead, knees, and stomach. Thankfully, my kneepads and helmet padding absorbed almost all of the impact.

Once I landed, I quickly turned around, and saw the bike in the air doing the horizontal mambo toward me. Before I knew it, it landed 180′ (opposite the direction I was going) on my right leg. I yelled an expletive, and promptly removed the foot from underneath the bike. Bob, Jay, and David quickly ran out to check on me and made sure I didn’t do anything additionally stupid. I asked Jay to get my camera out of the tankbag to shoot some photos:

My legs were in quite a bit of pain, but the shock helped it from being too bad. Dave checked to make sure I didn’t break anything, and then him and Bob quickly got on to getting my bike back up and straightening it out to ride it back out onto the main trail. Note, the logs you see are not the ones I went over (the bike is facing the wrong direction).

As you can see above, the metal bracket that goes above the headlight is hanging out. In fact, other than some scratches, the headlight was the only noticable damage:

Looking at the above photo, it looks like the headlight and windshield must have briefly hit the dirt before it came to rest on my leg. It’s somewhat all of a blur now. Jay, Bob, and Dave disassembled the headlight shroud and put it all back together while I rested and fired off more photos. I felt pretty bad about it all. The log was moved out of the way before David rode the bike back out. You can see how pitifully small it is here to the right:

After the incident, we decided to split into two groups. Bob and I backtracked 3.5mi on the trail to make it back out on to the main road and over to Suches. Jay and David continued on to some harder trails. I hated turning around, but as the adrenaline wore off, my right ankle and both knees were beginning to hurt quite a bit. Using the rear brake was absolutely no fun. Neither was putting my left foot down at stops. I made it out though with a smile on my face:

Lessons learned? I knew when I went to scout the trail that I was going a bit over my experience level, but did not think too much of it. I was excited. Know your skill level and ride appropriately. When you see a wet log, pause for a moment and consider the best technique to traverse it. Give some throttle to get your front tire off and then pause, then give some for the second throttle. I’m pretty sure I didn’t let go of the throttle enough between wheels.

How did the gear do? My Scorpion EXO-700 absorbed all of the impact, but I don’t think there was that much for it to do either. My Olympia Ranger 2 pants worked well, the knee armor absorbing most of the impact. The real hero’s were the Oxtar Matrix 2 boots I had on. The bike fell right up to the top of the boot line, and I am sure if I was just wearing hiking boots that I would have broken something. The Acerbis Koerta pressure suit I was wearing must not have taken much of an impact, as I don’t have any bruising or pains in the upper half.

A week after the incident, I still have a slight limp as my right knee doesn’t feel quite right. My wife made me get x-rays the day after it happened, and everything looked alright. The doc said it was all swelling and tendon-related pain and should be gone by the end of the week. The doc gave me some ibuprofen and Hydrocode to help ease the pain. I’m pretty happy that me and my bike made it through without too much injury.

I’ve asked myself if any gear would have helped? I think some more offroad oriented knee protectors would have helped. I believe that more MX-oriented boots could have minimized impact to my right ankle when the bike fell. An MX-type helmet with a peak/sunshade or a hybrid-style helmet such as the Arai XD could have taken some of the impact away from my forehead, but my forehead impact was very minimal already. The Arai XD however is about $500, whereas my EXO-700 is $180. One thing I did find out from this event is that unlike the higher-end helmet manufacturers, Scorpion will not do an analysis to see if your helmet is still safe to use. They summarized “Our helmets are already pretty inexpensive, you should just go buy a new one”. Their reasoning was that they did not want to be faulted for bad analysis. Even with that catch, I will be ordering another EXO-700 once I find one in stock.

Stay safe, and beware of wet logs.