TIFU by borrowing my dad’s bike to get to school

Context to start off: This happened around 2005ish when I was in middle school. Around this time, I liked to have a little fun bunny hopping my bike off of curbs. I was overweight, and rode a mountain bike, so that plus the occasional wheelie was the best I could do, but it was still really fun. There was a group of about four or five boys who were obsessed with BMX, to the point that they all rode tiny bikes that looked like they were made for toddlers, not middle schoolers. They were a little fascinated by the very fact that I, a girl, had even a passing interest in that kind of thing, so they knew which bike was mine, since I tended to ride the same one every day.

Except for this one particular day. I was running late, and as I grabbed my bike to head out, I realized one of the tires was flat thanks to the fact that I was a goat’s head thorn magnet. So I borrowed my dad’s bike. I parked the bike in the nearest rack slot to the door in a vain attempt to avoid being tardy. Skip to the end of the day. I hop on the bike, and on my way out of the school’s parking lot, I liked to do a few hops off little island curbs, so I started hopping.

I remember I got two good hops, but on the third, I remember a loud noise, then blackness. It never has been 100% confirmed that I lost consciousness, but I’m fairly sure I did for at least a few seconds, as from what I can remember, there wasn’t anyone around, and it was voices that roused me. I was face down on the asphalt, and my hands were down by my hips, meaning I had absolutely nothing breaking my fall. I was still pretty groggy, so when I looked up behind me, it took a second to register that the back tire of the bike was hanging over my head, only my backpack stopped it from coming down on my head.

As I started trying to get up, people swarmed around me, untangled me from the bike, and helped me back to the main building of the school. The school nurse was still there, so she administered first aid while the office called my dad to come pick me up. This was when we figured out what had happened. The front tire of the bike had gone flying off while I was mid-air, the fork of the frame stopped the bike cold, and good old momentum sent me head-first into the asphalt with zero time to react. We discovered later that I landed so hard that there was now a kink in the handlebars. Other than that, the bike was still functional, so there’s that slim silver lining.

I wasn’t injured too badly in spite of the black out, a few nasty scrapes and bruises, but nothing broken. My mother was/is a RN, so she and dad agreed that I didn’t need a trip to the ER. They both knew the major and minor symptoms of a concussion, and would treat it the same way an ER would anyway. I don’t remember if I did have a concussion, but if I did it was fairly mild, as I was doing better after a couple days of rest, and didn’t have any cognitive issues.

It was at least a few months before we finally learned what caused the tire to go flying that day. Turns out the BMX boys wanted to play a prank on whoever owned the bike. There was apparently some kind of unspoken rule that the slot I parked in that day was one only new kids used. Add that to the bike being one they didn’t recognize, plus a little dumbassery from teenage boys, and you get a “prank”. So they loosened the nut holding the tire to the frame.

The boys had been feeling terrible that their prank had gone so badly and hurt someone, but hadn’t stepped up for fear of getting in serious trouble. None of us held any ill will towards them for it, since they admitted they fully expected the tire to come away from the frame as the bike was pulled out of the rack. It was a major, unfortunate fluke that it stayed on as securely as it did to last two jumps. Had I decided to hang out with them that day, instead of straight home, I have no doubt they would’ve come clean right away to avoid any harm.

They weren’t really bad kids. Just dumb. Either way, given that this was definitely not my first crash thanks to my little bunny hopping hobby – but easily the worst – I made the decision to keep both wheels safely on the ground from then on. And parked in a different spot.

TL;DR: I borrowed my dad’s bike to get to school one day. Boys at the school thought it belonged to a new kid, and pulled a “prank” by loosening the nut holding the front tire on. It flew off in the middle of a jump, causing the worst bike crash I’ve ever had.