When the dog bites

My wife is a retired-from-competition former uberathlete. She was once ranked fifth in the world in the duathlon, was twice the Maryland triathlon champion, swam for Colgate, blah, blah, blah.

And although she no longer competes, she still runs a gazillion miles a week, swims endless laps and road-bikes all over the place.

Recently, on a Sunday where there was an awesome flea market in downtown Media, PA (hundreds and hundreds of sellers), we made plans to meet in Media. She would bike from the University where she teaches and I would, ahem, drive to Media.

Around noon or so I get a phone call from her telling me that she's leaving the school and heading to Media - that's about four or five miles. Her cell phone reception in this area, by the way Sprint, sucks.

A little while longer I begin to get worried. And then I get a broken-up, unintelligible call from her, but I can tell that something's wrong, really wrong.

Two or three broken up phone calls, all with the same sense of urgency, and then a few more, now with male voices trying to say something, really panics me, so I run to my van and race down the street where I knew she'd be biking.

I come across an ambulance, I stop and here's what happened:

She was biking down the street, not the sidewalk, but the street, and doing 25-28 MPH, which unless you're a really good road biker, is like the speed of light to chicken bikers like me.

On a lawn ahead of her, she spots a dog. A really big fucking, scary looking dog. She's a savvy road biker, with thousands of miles under her butt, and thus she mentally checks out that there's a big dog, but also that the dog's owner is holding the dog with a leash, but she keeps an eye on the situation.

As she zooms by, the dog pulls away from its owner, pulling her onto her stomach and escaping from her leash-hold, and makes an intersecting bee-line for the bike approaching down the middle of the street. And the dog lunges and bites her on her lower calf, a few inches above her knee.

This dog weighs 138 pounds (my wife weighs 115), and it's a half (what else?) Rottweiler and half Husky.

At this point, I think that 99% of the bikers on the planet would have been knocked off their bikes, with a huge dog clamped onto your leg. In fact I would have fallen off my bike had the dog just barked.

But she stays on and keeps pedaling. Can you imagine the strength and balance needed to do that?

And I suspect that one of the wheels, or perhaps the pedal, hits the dog and the beast lets go and returns to its screaming owner, probably licking its bloody chops.

By the time I got there, the ambulance was already there, and the cops had sized up the situation, and I send the ambulance away to emergency to deal with the number two pencil-sized holes that the canine monster had left on her thigh.

The very agitated dog owner: "I am so sorry, he's such a gentle dog, he's never bitten anyone before... he just reacts like that when joggers or bikers come across his territory..."