I didn’t crash, fortunately: my only physical complaint is sore shins from having to walk three miles in MTB shoes.
So the abridged version of the story is that I was up on the ridge trail on my gravel bike, and after I did a huge drop, found that my right side crank had come loose. Walked it in to the shop and my guy Ashton found that that side of the axle was welded into the crank, and the weld had failed and sheared off. He also said he’d never seen a break like that before, probably because most people who come into that shop don’t ride their gravel bikes as much or as hard as I do. So while I’m still out a bike for a week while we wait for the replacement to arrive, I at least feel like I earned it.
Unfortunately it wasn’t anything dramatic looking. At first blush, even after Ashton took the crankset apart and showed it to me, it didn’t really look like anything was amiss, other than there not being any way to fix the axle and the crank head back together again. A trained eye would have probably immediately spotted the evidence of a failed weld, but nothing really jumped out at me until he pointed it out. Even the manner in which it broke was pretty anticlimactic: I noticed something weird when my chain started rubbing on the front derailleur after I cleared that drop, and I couldn’t shift into the big ring, so I got off to look at it and then realized the crank/spider was loose.
Jesus, that’s gnarly. I hope he recovered.