Ride of Silence 2014

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

Reflections on a struggle

Day 2 of my 90 day challenge started out early, I was down at Lake Hollingsworth (a local running and biking hotspot) with 7 other members of my local triathlon club, FR Racing (www.frracing.net). Getting out in the early morning hours, in this case before the sun had a chance to show its face, is a magical thing. There's something special about getting your workout done in the darkness, before the rest of the world has lifted their heads from the pillow, You feel a sense of accomplishment getting home before school traffic, before most people have even hit their snooze button for the first time.

Today was scheduled to be an hour and a half at an "uncomfortable pace" Well in the first 5 minutes I found my "uncomfortable pace" and that seemed to be simply pedaling. While I did best my last personal best for a lap around the lake by almost a minute, I couldn't sustain myself, even at a much slower pace. I was on a new bike, I was grabbing too big of a gear, I didn't get enough sleep, there's all sorts of excuses I could place on why I wasn't performing up to what I should, but the truth of the matter is, it was just one of those days.

Some days you go out and feel like you can't do any wrong, you run like the wind, or pedal like a Tour de France Winner, or maybe you glide through the water like Phelps. Those days are magical, those days are meant to be cherished.

Where there is light however, there is always shadow. The shadow is those days where you don't want to, those days when you don't feel like it, the days that you're already tired, worn down, or frustrated before you even start, the days that you just can't seem to get it going. These are the days that will haunt you, the days that will cause you to put your head down in shame, to rethink what you're doing, doubt your training, your nutrition, even your love of the sport. These are the days that really define you as an athlete, the down days, the days when you struggle.

Everyone remembers Phelps winning Golds, Meb triumphantly crossing the finish line, Ripken's 2,131st game. What people tend to forget is the days that Cal showed up not feeling great and went 0-5, or the long training days in heat or rain, with blisters or pain that Meb endured, the seemingly endless lengths of the pool that Phelps swam before the Olympic spotlight shone on him. We focus on others "highlights" and compare our everyday to that, we think about our personal bests, and wonder why we can't beat them every time. The truth is training is a struggle, winning is far less about the moment of achievement that is so visible, and far more about the hours, days, weeks, months, & years of preperation, sweat and hard work that led up to that moment.

While we all want to have that "Big Victory", our "Gold Medal Moment", we have to learn to look forward to, enjoy and even celebrate the hard days, because without their presence and our desire to push through them... our victories will never come. Next time you have a hard day, don't think about Ripken's 2,131st game, think about what it took for him to lace up for game 945 when he wasn't feeling well, think about Meb's endless training runs, and celebrate the fact that you are a doer, and only through that doing will true achievement ever be realized.