Hank Locklin – "Please Help Me, I'm Falling" (1960)

Please help me,

I’m falling

You may have seen news footage of President Biden falling off his bicycle last weekend while riding in a state park near his Delaware beach house.

Some anti-Biden people – I’m talking about you, Fox News! – have argued that his fall is yet one more indication that he is too old and feeble to be President.

Before I saw video of his fall, I was prepared to disagree vociferously with that point of view.  

But now that I’ve seen the video, I’m not so sure.

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As loyal 2 or 3 lines readers know, I am an experienced and enthusiastic bike rider –  and an expert on all bicycle-related topics.  

It turns out that the oldest of my three bikes – a seven-year-old Trek FX3 hybrid – is almost identical to President Biden’s bike.

More significant for purposes of this discussion, I ride with toe cages on my pedals that are virtually identical to the toe cages that Biden uses.

Toe cages come in a variety of designs, but all have the same purpose: they make your ride much more efficient by preventing your feet from sliding around on your pedals.

Biden blamed his fall on his difficulty in getting his right foot out of his toe cage.  I have to question why a 78-year-old man who occasionally rides a few miles on the very flat trails at Cape Henlopen State Park in Delaware needs toe cages on his bike.  (I’ve ridden those trails, and I can tell you that my five-year-old grandson could ride them with ease – it’s about as easy a ride as I’ve ever done.) 

But having seen the video, I’m not sure that the toe cage was really the problem.

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Very casual bike riders usually come to a halt by applying the brakes, leaning to one side or the other, and putting a foot out until it hits the ground.  

If you can stop on a bike without getting off your seat, I can guarantee you that your seat is too low . . . which means you’re not extending your legs when you pedal . . . which means you’re going to need knee replacements any day now.

If your seat is at the right height, the only way your foot can reach the ground when you stop while you remain seated is to lean so far over that you will likely become unbalanced and fall.

But that’s not what happened to Biden.

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Here’s the correct way to stop when you’re on a bike equipped with toe cages.  (Actually, the principle is the same if you don’t have toe cages.  But it’s a little easy if toe cages aren’t involved.)

As you slow down and prepare to stop, you rotate the pedals forward so the right pedal is at six o’clock and the left pedal is at twelve o’clock.  (Actually, it doesn’t matter which pedal is down and which one is up – but when I ride, I put the right pedal down when I’m stopping, and Biden did the same.)

(So embarrassing!)

When you are about to come to a halt, you pull your left foot out of the toe cage and stand up on your right foot – which means you get your ass off your seat.  

As you stop, your trunk moves forward a bit so your ass is over the top tube of your bike’s frame – not over the seat.  As that happens, you lean slightly to the left and put your left foot on the ground.  Your body will be only slightly tilted to the left.

It’s easy to maintain your balance if you do this correctly.

Click here to watch a video demonstrating the correct way to stop a bicycle.

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I have occasionally fallen when I’ve had to stop suddenly – especially on an uneven trail – and found myself leaning to the right.  I haven’t practiced standing on my left foot and pulling my right foot out of my toe cage so I can land on that foot instead, so what happens is that I freeze and fail to get my right foot free in time – which means that there’s nothing to stop me from toppling over to the right.

If that’s what had happened to Biden last weekend, I would understand why he fell.  But that’s not what happened to Biden.

Click here to watch a video of the fall.  As you’ll see, he came to a stop with his right pedal at six o’clock, got his ass off the saddle, and and landed on his left foot – he looks a little clumsy doing it, but basically he utilizes the correct stopping technique.

But suddenly and for no apparent reason, he topples over to his right.

Yes, if he had extracted his right foot from the pedal and put it on the ground when he came to a stop, that wouldn’t have happened.  

But Biden shouldn’t have needed to put his right foot on the ground.  He was leaning on his left foot, which was already on the ground, yet somehow managed to lose his balance so badly that he fell over to the right.

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I don’t want to make too big a deal of this fall.  As far as we know, it’s only happened to him one time, and anything can happen once.

Of course, everyone knows that Biden isn’t firing on all cylinders either mentally or physically at this point.  We certainly don’t need him to go ass over teakettle while standing over his bike to prove that.

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“Please Help Me, I’m Falling” was written by the songwriting duo of Don Robertson and Hal Blair (who also wrote Lorne Greene’s 1964 spoken-word hit, “Ringo”). 

Hank Locklin’s original 1960 recording of the song was not only a #1 country-western, but also made it to #8 on the Billboard “Hot 100” pop chart.

“Please Help Me, I’m Falling” has been covered by the Everly Brothers, Charley Pride, John Fogerty, and Gladys Knight, among others.  It’s been covered twice by Loretta Lynn – once with Conway Twitty, and once with Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette. 

Click here to listen to Hank Locklin singing “Please Help Me, I’m Falling” at the Grand Ole Opry in 1962.

Click below to buy the record from Amazon: