{"id":4278,"date":"2013-04-09T00:00:21","date_gmt":"2013-04-09T07:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/of.jennism.com\/?p=4278"},"modified":"2013-04-09T00:00:21","modified_gmt":"2013-04-09T07:00:21","slug":"my-helmet-saved-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/?p=4278","title":{"rendered":"My helmet saved me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Good thing you were wearing your helmet,&#8221; one cyclist said.  The one wearing a beret and had traveled from San Jose.<\/p>\n<p>Ironically, earlier I had suggested not wearing a helmet.  Which would be a rare moment for me.  It&#8217;s even rarer than not having bike lights at night.<\/p>\n<p>The following are the times that I didn&#8217;t wear a helmet:<\/p>\n<li>In San Francisco: when I had left my helmet at home when I had left my bike overnight at work and was riding back<\/li>\n<li>Touring the rice fields in Vietnam.  I only realized that I didn&#8217;t have a helmet until we had ridden already 3 miles.<\/li>\n<p>That is it.  I am the most paranoid person I know.  I am the most cautious regular cyclist.  Considering how accident prone I can be.  I pause at stop signs while other cyclists ride around me.  I avoid going down 17th street because I want to avoid all the snaking muni rails.  I drive at night because I don&#8217;t want to ride at night.  I go slow around cars, especially when they double park.  I always take the lane and try to avoid lane splitting if ever possible.<\/p>\n<p>I would like to say that my helmet saved me when I fell and landed hard on my right side of my head.  But <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cyclehelmets.org\/1209.html\">some people<\/a> think differently.  Would I have ridden safer (like football players without helmets) if I wasn&#8217;t wearing one?  Would I have avoided in between the muni tracks if I wasn&#8217;t wearing one?  I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p>That night, I didn&#8217;t notice any damage to my helmet until the following morning.  The lower right side was cracked in multiple places like a jagged knife running upward through the styrofoam.  What is certain is that I didn&#8217;t get any surface scrapes on my head unlike my forearm (which is now fully purple and hating handshakes).  Did it compress?  I don&#8217;t know.  At the very least, I am sad for my fancy Giro black bike racing helmet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Good thing you were wearing your helmet,&#8221; one cyclist said. The one wearing a beret and had traveled from San Jose. Ironically, earlier I had suggested not wearing a helmet. Which would be a rare moment for me. It&#8217;s even &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/?p=4278\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4278"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4279,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4278\/revisions\/4279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/of.jennism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}