Heading down towards the turn, I felt like a kid staring at a chocolate cake and given a fork... beautiful day, beautiful turn. Probably explains my tunnel vision, although not sure if I could have seen the truck coming uphill until the bike was leaned over. But that was my first mistake. Basically I took the turn at a speed where I was assuming a car would not be... exactly where the truck was.
This was a narrow road, not even 2 full lanes, backcountry road. So yeah, basically going too fast, and being a Saturday afternoon, in retrospect I was rolling the dice for sure with that assumption (for anyone in the Sacramento area, this was Iowa Hill Road out of Colfax, last hairpin before you hit the N. fork of the American river, heading east)
https://goo.gl/maps/ZnThmz63XoamDrcG8
Yep, 5 mph narrow road...
https://goo.gl/maps/vNNajzbaiTccJdR57
(Looking at the images, I feel ridiculous reporting a crash on this turn... crazy tight turn!)
Basically, I was already mid-turn when I saw the truck, and with the bike fully leaned over grabbed the front brake, it tucked and lowsided, but I flew over the bike and rolled in front of it (so is that a lowside or a highside? I guess if you go over the bike, it's a highside). I can't say I would have hit the car if I didn't hit my brakes. The truck was, to the driver's credit, moving slowly and on the far right of the narrow road. And they did stop and get out to check on me.
Although I did hit my head, I was fine. What is it about crashing where your mind just blanks out? I have one memory of looking ahead and seeing the truck, I remember grabbing the front brake... and the next memory I have is being face down looking at asphalt. In the time I was getting thrown from the bike I did have the realization I was crashing, but my mind was a little like "wow, this is really happening". I was thinking rather than perceiving. I have no idea if I rolled or flipped, or what... the next moment it was over and I was getting up. Would have loved to have a video of that.
I have a scraped elbow (somehow completely missed the elbow pad in my jacket), and that's the worst of it. I was wearing a back protector and had just upgraded the back pad in the jacket, and I think that did help. I also was wearing knee/shin guards (7 years old now) and the right one was scraped, so it did it's job.
The weirdest thing is I hit my right shoulder... and it turns out my jacket was missing the right shoulder pad--what? No idea how that happened. But the crash was at a pretty low speed and I have just a little bruise on my shoulder.
The bike was fine... just had to tighten the rear-view mirror on the right side. Right grip is scraped. Minor plastics side scrape. Started up and ran no problems. I got lucky.
If I had entered the corner slower and focused on the possibility of a car (or large truck) around this blind turn, I may have been able to hit the brakes with the bike upright, or more upright and/or fight off the instinct to grab the brakes and had the bandwidth to just steer the bike into the far right side of the road.
I should share my ninja pregen to ninja 400 impressions sometime, but coming home tonight I thought... oh, oh, I can post this. I have found this sub-forum useful in the past if only as a reminder how easy it is to crash and how ridiculous some people are. I'm not going to beat myself up too much, but I'm feeling somewhat ridiculous.
The funny thing is that I imagine that the 40-something driver in the truck was probably ready to give me lecture thinking I was some teenager on supermoto, until I pulled off my helmet and saw I was ten years older than him!
