I just got totally destroyed by a Metro gate

As I approached the ticket turnstile this morning in Cleveland Park, I realized a train was just entering the station, so I prepared to make a run for it. I swiped my card, heard the gate retract, and began to haul ass...

Unfortunately, the right gate either did not retract or retracted much slower than the left one. Also unfortunate was the fact that it was the wider wheelchair entrance with a lower gate height. So instead of simply ramming into unretracted right gate and bouncing off the left wall, I was somehow fully launched -- like in the movies when someone steps on a landmine. Or perhaps, more accurately, like a skier going off a jump badly. I am not at all kidding. I went completely airborne, swiveled in mid air, and landed flat on my back a solid four or five feet beyond the gate.

As I laid there completely stunned for a moment, several people began stopping to gawk, surely asking themselves "What the fuck just happened?" It was at that moment that I realized there was an even greater urgency for me to catch the train... because if I didn't, I was going to have to deal with a bunch of strangers alternating between laughing at me and checking to see if I was okay. So I got up and ran for it. I jumped down the last seven or eight steps to the platform in one leap and just barely squirted through a closing train door.

It was the perfect escape. I caught the train while none of the other five to ten people who had witnessed the incident were able to recover in time to make it.