Learn everything you can, King Ozias was counseled as a boy: you never know what you might need later on.
Once upon a time in my early teens, I was zooming down the hill on my bike, past Tommy’s pond… when the freakin’ wheel fell off! I was pitched off the bike, over the handlebars, and onto the street. And I didn’t get hurt!
Why wasn’t I hurt? Because I was studying judo at the time and I’d learned how to take a fall–in this case, a forward roll. It’s the hardest fall to learn, but boy howdy, did it ever save my bacon when that wheel came off.
Not that I wanted to make a habit of it.
Yow! That doesn’t look like fine. The good thing is, kids are a lot tougher than adults, and once the immediate effects are dealt with, they seem to spring back, very quickly.
I grew up on the outskirts of town, with gravel roads. I had some amazingly catastrophic bike wrecks, most of which I recovered from, almost immediately. For whatever the reason, I had a marked preference for narrow tired bikes, which could slice their way to the bottom of virtually any depth of crushed limestone, so I had any number of bike accidents which related to that phenomenon.
These days, I ride a mountain bike, and in spite of being out in the country, most of the roads are paved, so I have the best of all worlds; a mountain bike that can handle the rough, and nice, fresh, asphalt, that is smooth as glass.
I never did find out what made my wheel come off, that time. My father fixed it.
If the wheel had come off my bike, it would have been because I had been messing with it. I was always taking my bike apart.