[Will Hunt]

Was riding from Malham to Skipton yesterday and some maniac came far far too close while going far far too fast as they overtook me. I couldn't dip into the road to avoid the upcoming hole so I tried to run it on the slither of tarmac between the hole and the edge of the tarmac where it dropped off into a mud layby. Would have been doing about 15mph so nothing fast but still managed to completely miss the tarmac and smack the front wheel into the mud. It caught.

"Jesus Christ!" says I as I scramble to get my head out of the path of the oncoming cars.

No twat even stopped to see if I was OK 

Slight dint in the helmet and a couple of scratches. Chunk taken out of the pedal, broken headlight and gears might need a slight tweak but apart from that pretty lucky. As I was trying to get out of the road I was just waiting to get clipped by something. Nasty feeling.

[Paul B]

Mine (I bet there are a few of you on the edge of your seat now?) was at Ceuse about 5 years ago.

I was on Alabama, a strange route for the crag as its very crimpy and British in style. On getting past the crux and to a large move where you set up to latch a bucket for some reason I decided I didn't have enough in the tank and sagged back onto the bolt. Only for my belayer to notice that I hadn't completed my knot. In fact I'd only just started tying in and all the was stopping me from hitting the deck was the UIAA tape around the end of the rope curling up. Thank f*ck for being light. I quickly grabbed the knot and was lowered to the ground. I didn't climb for the rest of the day and still to this moment don't know how it happened.

[GCW]

Mine (I bet there are a few of you on the edge of your seat now?) was at Ceuse about 5 years ago.

That suggests there's only been one time     

[slackline]

Glad you walked away from that Will.

@PaulB : Maybe you'd been chatting with Lynn Hill before setting off?

[Jaspersharpe]

I lowered off on the velcro of my Petzl harness a couple of times, only realising once I was back on the ground that I hadn't threaded the buckle at all. Like Paul, it was lucky I was about 13 and didn't weigh much!

[JamesD]

Just noticed this thread, thought I might add some of my exploits, some hilarious, some not so much.....

Age 13/14, I can't remember exactly... on my newly kitted out mountain bike, a lion bike masai no less! (piece of shit actually) I decided it would be great fun to race down this huge hill that I used to live on as a kid, about a mile/mile and a half long, I decided it would be great fun to shift into my 21st gear and see just how fast I could go, on off road mtb tyres with cantilever brakes.
Needless to say, I think I must have managed to hit around 40mph, as all of a sudden I managed to catch up with my mum and brother in her car on their way back from the shops, I overtook them like they were standing still (and my brother said they were doing around 30-35mph on the speedo).
Where we lived at the time had a long driveway to the communal car park/entrances that extended onto the curb and out into the road, with lots of trees and shit, I quickly realised after attempting to slow down a couple of times that my crappy plastic front cantilever was doing nothing and my shiny new tektro rear cantilever appeared to me laughing in my face everytime I pulled the lever. I was approaching home with no hint of slowing down, and I did not want to overshoot the turn off as it would have meant going flying around a corner into the next section of the road where you are greeted by endless driveways (and cars reversing out of them), and a very busy crossroads which I had absolutely no chance of stopping in time for if it was red...So I pulled my rear brake as hard as I could hoping it would do something at some point during the turn, took one foot off and slid sideways around the corner and down into our long driveway, narrowly missing the concrete wall and pillar, with my heart in my mouth the whole time.
I had managed to skid my 2 day old tyre all the way down to the carcass, scare the crap out of my mum, and leave a 20+ feet long skidmark all the way down my driveway, I didn't try it again in a hurry.

[JamesD]

Next up, a fun time out on the snowboard at lunchtime turns into a drunken crash at around 35mph, concussion, a bloodied nose, and some knee damage.
Lesson 1: Don't drink and ride
Especially because it suddenly makes your reactions really crappy when you decide to tackle a fun red run that you have done loads of times before, 3 jagatees, a beer or two, a huge mogul mid-turn, and a horrible crash later, I woke up with a really painful knee, a massive headache, a tweaked ankle on the other leg and some nice huge lumps of blood in my nose, (apparently I was out for a few minutes).
I've crashed/injured myself plenty of times on bikes and boards doing silly things, but as I was crashing this time I had one of those horrible moments, you know the ones.....where you think this isn't just going to hurt, this is going to really fuck me up.
Anyway it pretty much put an end to my snowboarding holiday, and left me unable to ride a bike or work-out without pain for a good 2-3 months.

By far and away the most painful/life altering incident I was ever involved in though was the time I was passenger in a car crash.
I was in my friends toyota yaris, on our way to the cinema, and a people carrier driver decided to overtake a traffic island mid-corner whilst adjusting his radio, my friend was speeding by about 15-20mph, so i'm guessing he was close to 60mph, the other guy was doing 30-40mph, but judging by all accounts there was no way we would have stopped in time anyway, it was so sudden, we hit the guy head on, I was knocked unconscious on impact, but from what witnesses have said we went about 15-20 ft up and about 40ft through the air, off of the main road and landing in a side road onto someones garden wall right outside their front door.
When we landed, the first point of contact with the garden wall was the passenger door, which went straight into my leg in a delightful v-shape shattering my femur into about 4 pieces, and turning a small part of it to dust. When I woke up, I didn't realize what had happened at first, all I knew was that I couldn't breathe, I was covered in blood and glass, upside down and I thought this was it, i'm going now, I desperately fought to try and get my lungs to work, all of a sudden air! finally.
Now I could breathe, I looked around and tried to figure out what happened, my friend was folded over like a doll wedged in between the broken drivers seat and the door, something liquid like was pouring onto me rapidly, I realised after a few seconds it was his blood draining out all over me from his head and face. In my head I yelled are you ok? my body took a few seconds to respond to my brains command, I got no response, I assumed the worse, but my brain was so fuzzy I couldn't quite take everything in properly, it just didn't seem real.
The fire-brigade, ambulances, police, and god knows how many onlookers had turned up, they started to cut us out and my friend was taken away first, they were shouting stuff about blood transfusions, neck braces, possible brain damage, and him not being conscious.
The next 3 days were a blur of concussion, medication and haziness from the 3 operations I had to have and the amount of anaesthetic that must have been in my system, when I was finally a bit more coherent, I figured out the total injury tally:
Multiple fractures to my femur
Internal bleeding where the bone had damaged muscle tissue
Several fractured ribs
Heavy concussion, (which left a couple of nice little bumps on my head for a long time!)
Lots of bruising, and minor lacerations
Crush injuries to my right lower leg, which then resulted in compartment syndrome and them having to de-compress it twice, I then needed a massive skin-graft to repair the damaged skin.
Heavy concussion

and a few other minor bits I am no doubt leaving out.

The whole incident left me unable to walk normally for nearly 2 years, and unable to walk without immense pain for 3-4 years, I also now have to wear special innersoles to walk comfortably for any kind of distance outside the house, now and again I still get burst of pain from the scar tissue in the muscle areas, usually from cold weather, or doing an exercise I haven't done for a while.
A small price to pay for still being on this earth though, and i'm glad I am, it could have been a lot worse.
My friend made a full recovery (after a few years of plastic surgery), and no one was killed in the accident thankfully.

[nai]

No twat even stopped to see if I was OK   
Slight dint in the helmet and a couple of scratches.

Still can't believe how folk turn a blind eye.  When I was 17 I hit a dog on my motorbike, went over the bars, made quite a mess of all three of us.  So there's me, helmet smashed, clothes torn, etc, the dog dead and quite messy and pieces of bike strewn all over an urban road and not one cunt bothered to stop, just pulled around the whole scene like it was a parked car, skip or some other everyday obstacle that dared get in the way of their commute.   I remember sitting in the road dazed while all these cars passed wondering why nobody was stopping, was getting to their shitty job or losing their place in the queue into brum really that important?
 
Glad you walked away ok Will, do you know some helmet manufacturers have crach replacement programs whereby you send them your lid and details of the crash and you get a discounted one in return.  No real consolation but could be worth investigating.

[SA Chris]

I'm pretty sure Giro do.

[aLICErOBERTSfANkLUB]

Scotland

Rover 200 hire car, M74, driving south, middle lane - overtaking, & bonnet lid flew open and smashed windscreen, dropping rear view mirror off and simultaneously removing all forward vision.

[fatdoc]

Next up, a fun time out on the snowboard at lunchtime turns into a drunken crash at around 35mph, concussion, a bloodied nose, and some knee damage.
Lesson 1: Don't drink and ride
Especially because it suddenly makes your reactions really crappy when you decide to tackle a fun red run that you have done loads of times before, 3 jagatees, a beer or two, a huge mogul mid-turn, and a horrible crash later, I woke up with a really painful knee, a massive headache, a tweaked ankle on the other leg and some nice huge lumps of blood in my nose, (apparently I was out for a few minutes).
I've crashed/injured myself plenty of times on bikes and boards doing silly things, but as I was crashing this time I had one of those horrible moments, you know the ones.....where you think this isn't just going to hurt, this is going to really fuck me up.
Anyway it pretty much put an end to my snowboarding holiday, and left me unable to ride a bike or work-out without pain for a good 2-3 months.

By far and away the most painful/life altering incident I was ever involved in though was the time I was passenger in a car crash.
I was in my friends toyota yaris, on our way to the cinema, and a people carrier driver decided to overtake a traffic island mid-corner whilst adjusting his radio, my friend was speeding by about 15-20mph, so i'm guessing he was close to 60mph, the other guy was doing 30-40mph, but judging by all accounts there was no way we would have stopped in time anyway, it was so sudden, we hit the guy head on, I was knocked unconscious on impact, but from what witnesses have said we went about 15-20 ft up and about 40ft through the air, off of the main road and landing in a side road onto someones garden wall right outside their front door.
When we landed, the first point of contact with the garden wall was the passenger door, which went straight into my leg in a delightful v-shape shattering my femur into about 4 pieces, and turning a small part of it to dust. When I woke up, I didn't realize what had happened at first, all I knew was that I couldn't breathe, I was covered in blood and glass, upside down and I thought this was it, i'm going now, I desperately fought to try and get my lungs to work, all of a sudden air! finally.
Now I could breathe, I looked around and tried to figure out what happened, my friend was folded over like a doll wedged in between the broken drivers seat and the door, something liquid like was pouring onto me rapidly, I realised after a few seconds it was his blood draining out all over me from his head and face. In my head I yelled are you ok? my body took a few seconds to respond to my brains command, I got no response, I assumed the worse, but my brain was so fuzzy I couldn't quite take everything in properly, it just didn't seem real.
The fire-brigade, ambulances, police, and god knows how many onlookers had turned up, they started to cut us out and my friend was taken away first, they were shouting stuff about blood transfusions, neck braces, possible brain damage, and him not being conscious.
The next 3 days were a blur of concussion, medication and haziness from the 3 operations I had to have and the amount of anaesthetic that must have been in my system, when I was finally a bit more coherent, I figured out the total injury tally:
Multiple fractures to my femur
Internal bleeding where the bone had damaged muscle tissue
Several fractured ribs
Heavy concussion, (which left a couple of nice little bumps on my head for a long time!)
Lots of bruising, and minor lacerations
Crush injuries to my right lower leg, which then resulted in compartment syndrome and them having to de-compress it twice, I then needed a massive skin-graft to repair the damaged skin.
Heavy concussion

and a few other minor bits I am no doubt leaving out.

The whole incident left me unable to walk normally for nearly 2 years, and unable to walk without immense pain for 3-4 years, I also now have to wear special innersoles to walk comfortably for any kind of distance outside the house, now and again I still get burst of pain from the scar tissue in the muscle areas, usually from cold weather, or doing an exercise I haven't done for a while.
A small price to pay for still being on this earth though, and i'm glad I am, it could have been a lot worse.
My friend made a full recovery (after a few years of plastic surgery), and no one was killed in the accident thankfully.

holy fuckin shit...

I know this thread had a climbin bias... and my teener experience got much interest..

BUT

that shit is the result of what I do for a living...

You are the lord of this thread, and I have learnt from this... a lot.

brave post dude.

thank you.

[GraemeA]

When I was in this car (as a passenger).



Everyone got out ok.

The crash, or at least the impending crash, was fucking scary. Ending up under water (albeit only 12" but we didn't know that at the time) was even more scary. But not knowing whether your 5 mates in the car were alive was the worst.

[slackline]

When I was in this car (as a passenger).

Bloody 4x4 Green Laners! 

[petejh]

I've got a few now I think about it, although they're a bit war storyesque:

Whilst in army between 1992-2002 I got shot at a few times - once on the border in Northern Ireland when some IRA rocked up just across the border from us in the middle of the night with an anti-aircraft machine gun mounted in the back of a pickup and started blasting away at us in our patrol base, quite exciting watching the tracers fly overhead but we were probably fairly safe because they had a crap aim. 
A closer call was in Bosnia 1995. We were using a bombed out factory in a town in northern Bosnia as our base, and one day me and two mates were walking across some open waste ground to go to the kitchen for lunch. As we crossed the open ground we got shot at from some buildings which overlooked the factory, the bullet went in-between two of us and impacted behind. It was close enough to feel the disturbed air, which is very close. We crawled a little bit more to the kitchen and then walked in, sat down and had our pie and chips without any further comment, very weird the things you got used to out there. Another time a lorry load of drunk Bosnian muslims returning from the front-line opened up on our observation post at 2 in the morning, they were all in the back of an open lorry parked 200 metres away with it's open back facing us and the dozy fuckers don't know how close they all were to being massacred - it was only because our machine-gun jammed at the critical moment that they weren't all killed, and by the time we got it unjammed I'm glad they'd buggered off.
Quite a few of the guys got very lucky (relatively speaking) - getting shot through the web of the hand, stepping on home-made mines but only getting shrapnel through the fleshy part of the foot and through the chin etc etc.
2000 - went to Florida to do a 3 week crash course (haha) to learn to fly light aircraft. On the second week, just as I was coming in to land, a cross-wind kept pushing the plane off the side of the runway and I was too inexperienced to be able to deal with it, the instructor took over but by now we were too low and too late and we ended up crashing the plane and sliding sideways down the runway on the tip of the wing. I remember thinking the plane was going to burst into flames at any minute but luckily it didn't. I ended up passing the course and got my pilot's license but only after another close scrape whilst flying solo when I almost crashed into the forest that surrounded the airfield because I had the wrong flap/power settings when trying to abort from another landing.
Various motorbike close calls (fucking deadly things), when I was learning to ride I brought a zx6r as my first bike, I was following a friend who could really ride well and I ended up going too fast into a bend, crossing both opposite lanes of a dual carriageway and stopping in the opposite verge a couple of seconds before a lorry came the other way. 
In climbing I've had various 'epics' but all involving the other person having accidents/getting ill/ getting frostbite, nothing too close for me except for when I almost messed up at the top of a sport route by leaning back on a sling (snake sling - single strand with an eye at each end) which I thought was clipped into the anchors but in fact wasn't clipped to anything, I caught the anchor as I weighted the sling. I think sport route/abseiling complacency is the biggest killer/cause of injuries in climbing.

[JamesD]

holy fuckin shit...

I know this thread had a climbin bias... and my teener experience got much interest..

BUT

that shit is the result of what I do for a living...

You are the lord of this thread, and I have learnt from this... a lot.

brave post dude.

thank you.

I learnt a couple of things:

1: I'm not invincible, I think this was the first injury that actually put me in hospital for more than one night
2: The Toyota Yaris is surprisingly crash-worthy for such a little crappy looking car, considering we hit a Kia Sedona 

Ok I shouldn't laugh, but you develop a slightly morbid sense of humour about these things over time, along with a sudden irrational fear of roller-coasters, or being a passenger in any other kind of vehicle you don't have control over, and at the same time a new found acceptance that you could quite easily die at any time so you have to make sure you enjoy the time you do spend alive