To borrow from movies that start with the end and then show you the progression (ie The Usual Suspects), let me just say that I am a lucky bastard.
Last night before I went to bed, I meandered over to my computer to check what workout was on my schedule for today. A 1 hour spin to recover from my long ride on Saturday and my interval session yesterday. Great (read with sarcasm), can’t wait! So I wake up this morning and grab my water bottle, my towel (frame protection), my shoes in preparation for 1 hour of complete boredom when it occurs to me that it is already getting light outside and that if I act quickly I can get a 1-1.5 hour ride in outside before work. So I race to get all the necessary things done, checking tire pressure, filling bottles, finding my HRM, jersey and pull out of the house around 545. Perfect. I can get in my ride and be back by 700 or so.
The beginning of the ride starts out well. I have a friend that lives about 40 minutes away with mostly bike friendly roads in between and decide to ride to his house and back. I am feeling good. The cool breeze of the morning is refreshing and I make my turnaround. I have to take Thunderbird Road, which has a bike lane, back to 36th Street so that I can make it to the path through Phoenix Mountain Park and back to my house. As I approach 36th Street, I peer over my shoulder in preparations for crossing over to the left hand turn lane to turn onto 36th Street. I see a red car about 25 yards behind me and a white SUV well behind the red car. As the red car passes me, I start to make my move. BIG MISTAKE! When I looked back originally, I didn’t pay attention to how fast the white SUV was going and therefore grossly overestimated the gap between red car and the white SUV. I hear a horn and screeching tires! I look back over my shoulder and the white SUV is coming right at me and is a few yards away! I thought “HOLY SHIT, I am going to die.” Luckily, just as I turned back to look, the driver was making her move to avoid me and I could tell that she (yes, I was able to notice the sex of the driver that was about to kill me) was going to bail out to the left so I went right a little and avoided leaving my wife and three kids without a father. I am such a moron. It will be the last time I don’t look over my shoulder twice before crossing into a left turn lane. I still can’t get it out of my head. Writing it out helped. Thanks for reading about my stupidity.