Tonight it wasn't hard to come up with a topic for this Blog. Tonight I knew what I was going to write about, and for a change I've been thinking a lot about exactly what I was going to write. Tonight was the Ride of Silence, a bicycle ride of about 8-12 miles at no more than 12mph, ridden entirely in silence in memory of those killed and injured while cycling by other vehicles, it's also to raise awareness for cyclists rights to be on the road and to be treated fairly in the hopes that a ride to memorialize those that we have lost will not be necessary.
For a few moments tonight, the cycling community came together, as we have all too few yet all too many times. For a few moments we weren't riders out of one of the shops, we were "roadies", "tri friends", or just casual peddlers, we came together, in silence for the memory and for the good of cycling as a whole. We were 66 cyclists riding out of several shops, riding several different kind of bikes, from the roadies that stayed under 12mph but never dropped below 90rpm of cadence, the lone guy in the bike on the tri bike, trying to remember to stay out of his aero bars, the man just back from a motorcycle accident on his first group ride, the passionate about biking entrepreneur on the tandem, the young lady clearly struggling with simply making it around the lake, the older rider taking extra laps at the end to get in his workout, or the big guy on the mountain bike clearly not his size.
Almost 40 years ago my father was hit while cycling home from Lakeland Regional Hospital, hit by a driver and left for dead in a ditch. He lay there, in the darkness not knowing if he would survive, the driver continued on his way. Were it not for a nurse on her way home noticing that the bike laying on the side of the road belonged to my father, he may have died in that ditch. As it was her stopping and finding him there saved his life, while she was there in time to ensure he didn't die, she wasn't there in time to save all of him. That night my father didn't lose his life, but he did lose his leg from above the knee.
I can't say that I know the pain of losing a loved one to a cycling accident, and I don't begin to compare that to the experience I'm about to detail, I lost something that day, my father lost something that day. He lost his love of cycling, he lost the freedom of the road, he lost a hobby, and although he doesn't often speak of it, I know he has mourned that loss every day since. What have I lost you might ask, while I didn't lose my father entirely, a lost a part of him, someone that I never knew, a father that would've woken up early to go for a "century" on the weekend, helped me wrench on my first road bike, maybe even cheered me on at my first bike race. While it's a lot harder to quantify the loss for me, it is still there. As I've, in the past year, gotten into cycling, I find myself looking next to me sometimes on long rides, wondering what it would be like if dad was riding alongside me, pushing me, letting me draft when I get tired, or racing me on that last stretch before we get home. He still rides, only on trails and on a trike now, which isn't quite a match for the riding that I do, crouched over aero bars for hours on end, so we bond over cycling, but all the while I notice the look when I talk about that great stretch along some road, or the flinch if I mention a "close call", make no mistake I lost something that day too.
There were lots of stories on this ride today, and the paragraphs above encapsulate only my own, but one thing that I'm sure of, all 66 of these riders came out for a reason tonight, a purpose, whether it was for a loss like mine, the loss of a close friend, a spouse, someone that that saw once a week at a shop ride, or maybe just someone that they felt a special kinship with because that person ventured out on two wheels as well, no matter what the reason I know that we gathered in that parking lot as 66 cyclists, but left that lot and rode this ride as one.
Thank you to all who came out, not just to this Ride of Silence but to them all, the world over.
Thank you to my friend Jesse Cookson for capturing this short video of the riders tonight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_fzP3f-pVc
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