One of the things that Mongo has a bad habit of doing while riding is not looking where I'm going. This might seem like a "major' problem, but in reality, it's not really. Sometimes when tired, I let the weight of my massive cranium bring my eye-level down to only a few feet in front of my bike...causing me to lose track of any obstacles that may be further up the road. Though I always eventually look up, sometimes this has gotten me into trouble.
Potholes, dogs, people, debris, snakes...have all been on the receiving end of my lack of "farsight". Though the only things I've ever hit are road craters, there have been some close calls.
The other day I was on the home stretch of another successful smackdown, and was in the drops hammering the final nail in the coffin, when I looked up at 27 mph and realized I was thirty feet away from plowing into the backs of a nice young couple and their dog. Luckily, my years of Ninja training in Okinawa paid off, and I narrowly avoided an unexplainable and inexcusable catastrophe.
Today I was in a similar situation when I was forced to bunny-hop a large branch at the last second that I never saw coming. It was a "sweet" hop, by the way, with the kind of amplitude not usually found on the skinny tire circuit.
My point is this...As road cyclists, we are at the mercy of cars and their drivers. Careless and ignorant motorists literally threaten our lives every time we take to the roads. In the same vain, pedestrians, joggers, bladers, people on that "super-gay", stand-up, Trikke thingy, deserve the same consideration and respect from cyclists as we expect from motorists.
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