The Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON – You ride at your own risk. And with President Bush, pushing hard atop his mountain bike, there’re plenty of risks.

A slick trail. A sharp turn. A steep hill. Or in Michael Wood’s case, a drainage ditch.

Riding with the president during one of his regular weekend workouts at the U.S. Secret Service training center outside Washington, Wood tumbled into the ditch – and broke his collarbone.

“It’s healing,” he said in a interview the other day, explaining that he “stupidly didn’t see” the ditch, and hit it at the “wrong angle.”

Wood, a Washington businessman, is just the latest victim of hard knocks on the Bush biking trail.

Austin, Texas, consultant Mark McKinnon separated his shoulder during one particularly wild ride at the president’s Texas ranch. Former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card fractured an arm just before he left this spring. And Bush himself has taken a couple of well publicized spills, including one last year at a summit of world leaders in Scotland when he clipped a Scottish police officer.

The officer limped away with a badly banged ankle. The president escaped with a few scrapes.

“When you ride hard on a mountain bike, sometimes you fall,” Bush told reporters the next day, explaining the pavement was slick and “the bike came out from underneath me.”

“It just goes to show,” he quipped, “that I should act my age.”

Bush, who usually works out one way or another six days a week, took up mountain biking early in his presidency after bad knees forced him off the jogging trail. He regularly rides at his ranch, at Camp David, the Secret Service training center in Beltsville, Md., and at the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Va.

He’s also hauled his Trek along on Air Force One for a workout in Scotland, a ride with Chinese cyclists in Beijing and tours of some nation’s finest scenery in California and Idaho. On Friday, he rode at Camp David with the visiting prime minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

“It’s going to be hard work,” the prime minister told the president before they set out, “but I’ll do my very best to keep up with you.”

One of the president’s regular biking companions, Wood is among Bush’s oldest friends, going back to their prep school days at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and later at Yale University. Last month, the president tapped him as the new U.S. ambassador to Sweden.

At first, the White House declined to provide details of Wood’s mishap, describing his injury as minor and identifying him only as a “private citizen who happened to be biking with the president.” But the next day, the White House named him and disclosed his injury as a broken collarbone.

“It was pretty painful,” Wood recalled. But he, like McKinnon, said he’s well aware of the risks of mountain biking, particularly with the president.

“It’s a contact sport,” McKinnon said, remembering his fateful fall.

“Coming around a bend off a steep hill, the bike just went out from under me,” he said. “The bike slid sideways, and I went down – hard on my shoulder.”

Like the president, McKinnon was wearing a helmet. And now, he says, he’s wearing all sorts of body armor: “Knee pads, shoulder pads, arm pads . . . pads all over the place.”

“When you ride with the president,” he warned, “you should expect to go down.”

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(c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News.

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ARCHIVE PHOTO on KRT Direct (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): BUSH BIKE

AP-NY-06-09-06 2117EDT

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