Friday Group Ride #140
What a week it’s been. Since USADA released its reasoned decision on the US Postal doping conspiracy, the flood of confessions that followed and the various spin off conflicts and conflagrations, my head has been a mess. My urge is always to find the way forward, to stay positive, but I have not found a good way to wrap my mind about what’s happened to our sport.
Then, of course, Padraig crashed his bike, which put a lot of the stuff on my mind into much better perspective. What a cadre of deluded pro athletes did in hotel rooms and shady medical clinics over the last decade-and-a-half is fascinating and depressing in equal measure, but I am part of something larger than that, something that starts with my closest friends and family and extends out to the larger cycling community. We launched the Beer Face Crash Relief effort to try to help Padraig out with medical expenses, and that just reinforced for me how massively positive cycling and the cycling community are for my life. I stopped thinking about doping and the dopes who doped.
When the idea of raising money first came up, my initial reaction was fear. Padraig and I are close. What if I couldn’t do it? What if I failed? And then, within 24 hours of the first conversation we’d raised every dime we needed. All we did was ask for the price of a beer, and you, our readers, drowned us in it.
This might be the single, biggest surprise of my cycling life, following closely behind being asked to write for RKP in the first place. That was like having my favorite band ask me to be their new guitar player. If you’d ever heard me play guitar, you’d know what a long shot that analogy really represents.
Of course, there have been other great surprises, finding out I could ride 100 miles in a day, finding out I could clear a section of single-track I’d failed to ride 100 times before, meeting people on steep hills and forming instant bonds simply by dint of our shared effort.
If you ride, it will come. That has been my experience.
This week’s Group Ride asks: What have been your biggest (and best) surprises from cycling? What have you learned about the world that you wouldn’t have dared hope was true before? What have been the gifts and how would you have gotten them, if not for the bike?
Beer Face – Crash Relief Fund (UPDATED)
PLEASE READ BELOW
As you know, Patrick crashed his bike. In fact, he just about tore his bottom lip off, and 9 hours in the emergency room later, not to mention the prolonged attention of a plastic surgeon, he’s got bills that insurance won’t touch.
We, his friends, would like to help him get out from under the accident as quickly as possible, so he can focus on healing and also preparing for the imminent birth of his second child.
The man himself is massively reticent about this whole undertaking as he feels responsible for the crash. It was, after all, a solo effort. So, we would like to propose something slightly different.
We have all enjoyed RKP over the last few years. In a very real way, we’ve been on a long, hard ride together, cheering and celebrating our sport, brainstorming solutions for the problems it faces, and sharing expertise on the products we use. Patrick has been the ride leader, and given there is no entry fee for this ride, we’d like to suggest each of you buy our leader a beer. Figuratively of course.
Let’s say a beer is $5. We’d like to ask each of you to contribute that to the fund to cover Patrick’s medical costs. Just $5. You wouldn’t hesitate to buy a buddy a beer after a hard ride together. Let’s do this for Patrick now.
It looks like the ambulance ride, ER time and follow up with the surgeon come to $5,000, so we’re aiming to buy Patrick 1,000 beers. Help us make this happen.
Here are the particulars:
CURRENT TOTAL = $5000+ – Thank you!
We have reached our goal! In fact, we have surpassed it. And, in the interest of complete transparency, before we do anything further, we need to get a final tally of donations and a sharper total for expenses. This has all happened far more quickly than any of us imagined, so while we started out with the goal of raising $5,000, we figured we’d have time to more clearly outline expenses before we even began to approach that goal.
Your generosity has been sudden and overwhelming.
The last thing we want to do is move the goal posts for this project, so we are working quickly to gather what bills are available and to factor in the tax consequences of taking in this money. At the moment, it appears we have all the money we need to address the Brady family’s financial consequences from the crash.
Over the next days we will put out another post with all the details of the expenses and contributions. Thanks everybody who wrote in and/or donated. We are all humbled by the way our community has rallied to our aid.
