That being said, after safely taking down a couple dozen trees, I took down a 18" trunk ash, over 50 feet high.
For some stupid reason I waited a bit too long to start moving and instead of going to the side, I chose to outrun it.
I had the same experience as you did. There were broken limbs driven in so deep I needed a pry bar to get them out. If I had fallen, I would have been speared. I lost the race but all that hit me were some thin branches at the top.
I still don't understand why I made such a dumb move.
I usually found that walking 135 degrees from the intended path worked for me... when I was doing the cutting.
But, in this case, carelessness and inattentiveness were a problem. I wasn’t the guy with the chain saw. I had taken a break and was maybe 15 feet off to the side of the tree, and my partner was felling the tree. There was no wind, the tree was bushy ,but not asymmetric. The guy doing the cutting was pretty good about making his notch and his undercut.
Nevertheless, the tree twisted on the stump as it fell, and came down in a completely unexpected direction. Had I been the guy with the saw, at the stump, no problem, I would have adjusted and walked away. But really, I should have been 60 feet away, since I didn’t have that central position at the stump or control of the notch.
My bad. But, like a few other stupid situations I could have avoided, the worst didn’t happen.