Crash tips?

I fell the other day after slicing along a curb (again, just not concentrating) and I somehow managed to sort of hop off and ended up sliding along on my left knee. I must have the strongest trousers cus they didn't rip and I didn't even graze my knee! I definitiely felt it though and a few days later the back of my left leg rather hurts from a deep bruise.

I would say that the best thing you can do is try to ditch the bike. Who cares what happens to the bike as long as you don't hurt yourself too much. I've fallen before and it happened so quickly that I was out before I knew I'd hit the floor. I was still holding onto the bars when I was down, so I'd obviously failed to 'bail and let go'!

I both agree and disagree with this statement, I think it depends on the situation you find yourself in, i'm never one to give a shit about damaging my bike in a crash situation, but sometimes I find it benefical to either stay in contact with the bike or try and stay on it to rescue the situation. For instance when i've had to bail out of reasonably high wallrides, I will attempt to get both feet out of the clips (this doesn't always work!) but keep one hand on the bars to steady my self as I jump down to the ground, and then let go of the bike and roll, this has generally worked out quite well for me in these situations and the worst i've had to suffer is a small bruise on my arm or something. Thankfully I have only ever had 2 crashes on the roads over the years, one was (on my fixed) due to mechanical failure where I went over the bars, managed to roll with the fall, messed my arm up a bit with some road rash and really hurt my finger, but other than that most of the damage was just to the bike. The other was on my bmx and a car reversed out on me, I stayed on the bike until the last conceivable moment, bunnyhopping over someones garden wall, anticipating him continuing to reverse, but he stopped, so I laid the bike down and slid on the concrete to avoid hitting the car and supermanning over it, it left me with a few bruises and nothing more. I've lost count of the amount of times i've crashed on my snowboard though!