On almost the exact day, two months later, I hopped on my bike to join the team for the Ride for Missing Children for the first time since Dad's accident for their penultimate, 50-mile training ride. And holy crap. These guys are intense bikers - even on the day of Dad's crash, they continued on, shaken to the core, for the rest of the 25 miles. They are people who have had to stay strong-minded for years to ride in the event, many of them have lost loved ones to abduction and are still trying to find them, and all of them look at these rides as a team event wherein not one athlete is better than the other. I have so much respect and admiration for these people that getting back on the saddle after 2 months was not an option. I had promised myself, my father, and the rest of them that I would.
I did NOT anticipate that Dad would be joining me.
To preface this, and it's a little gory, so I'm sorry: Dad's injuries were not superficial. For the first 48 hours, none of us slept waiting for the phone to ring and praying he'd pull through the night. He had seizures. He had (has) a dislocated shoulder, broken ribs, and a lacerated ear. He had chips out of his skull, and trouble remembering things - his memory kept resetting (which is a common occurrence with concussions and trauma, but when you're dealing with someone like my father who can remember pretty much anything...). It was terrifying and I know that, even though I said I would get back on my bike for another ride, I had written it off as a possibility. No way was I strong enough to handle the anxiety.
When Dad crashed, I was ahead of him on the road (I'm a new rider this year, so they try to set the pace off of that as a team and make you go up front with the leader). I was at the bottom of what had been a pretty steep decline, probably at about 25-30mph, and something felt reckless about our speed. I heard the crash, and then the cries from the team of "MAN DOWN", and even before turning around I knew it was my Dad. I had no reason to think that, I just did. I saw his friend, John, on the road just behind me - John had been behind my Dad in the lineup - and saw that he was pretty banged up, but okay. He had crashed into my Dad's bike and gotten thrown forward off of his own. I couldn't see Dad anywhere, and scanned the 20 team members frantically for him until I saw that he was surrounded by 5 or 6 of them, clearly badly injured and unconscious, making horrific noises I will never get out of my memory, about a half mile up the hill. I ditched my bike and ran to him panicked, and to say the ten minutes before we could get him to open his eyes were the longest of my life is an understatement.
The ambulance ride, trauma center and rest of that day was a blur of trying not to cry and praying he'd come through. I felt like the team made me push through the weak moments when I nearly lost it in front of him. When he had a seizure episode in the hospital, about 3 hours after he'd been brought in, the nurses left me alone with him and I felt utterly lost in my own helplessness, holding his hand and trying to let him know he was fine. Just then, Dan Craven - who leads these rides - walked into the room. He proceeded to tell us about his own bike crashes, and experiences where a teammate had been hurt like this, and how they got back on their bikes. It comforted me in those moments to think about Dad riding again, like nothing had ever happened. Unrealistic, I thought, but it gave me a glimmer of hope as I scanned his war wounds.
Yesterday, Dad and I rode to the training ride site together at 7am. He had gone out on his bike with Dan, Jim, and a few other guys from the team a few nights before and said he was ready. Now that his main injury is his shoulder, he wanted to get back in the game. Granted, Dad has no memory of the crash at all, but still - my amazement overcame my fears on the ride over.
Then we started out, and my heart was racing so fast I could feel it in my temples. I was in front, again, because I haven't done a ride for 2 months. I felt my hands shaking on the handlebars. I was wearing the same shorts and helmet I wore the day of the crash (Dad bought them for me before his accident). Dad was behind me in the lineup, just like before, and on the first major decline I felt like I was having some kind of panic attack. I couldn't see Dad, and I clutched my brake for dear life with an irrational certainty that the same thing was going to happen. I started to feel sick, and pulled over on the side of the road after we'd cleared that hill, saying that I thought something was wrong with my bike.
Jim, who held up the end of the team, let my Dad and everyone else pass me, and said "You'll feel better with your Dad ahead of you." On the last ride, Dad took his fall behind me, and since I can't ride glancing over my shoulder all the time, I was freaking out over my lack of visibility. The rest of the 30 miles were a blur of me feeling out of the game (Even running every day doesn't train for biking like this), staying behind my father and watching in awe as he easily powered up every hill, and took a controlled, steady descent on the way down. Jim, riding beside me most of the time, coached me through everything, "Go into 1, stay in your lower gear, stay upright - you need your lungs, keep your mind strong, riding this kind of thing is 90% mental - you are in shape, you're strong, you can do this!!" He shouted these things to me as I cursed my way up what felt like thousands of hills, and kept telling him I thought my bike was malfunctioning (Basically, I was wimping out by mile 30, haha). He wouldn't let me quit, at some point literally taking one hand and pushing me forward for three solid miles of incline.
My Dad never took a moment's pause the entire day. To the astonishment of our teammates, he rode the entire 50 miles, smiling, cautious but steady. We celebrated as a team, a family and friends. It was the kind of victory we all felt - even people who weren't on the ride.
At the end of the day I heard myself say to him "...It's almost like nothing ever happened." And it really was, except I think every one of us is a little bit tougher, and a hell of a lot happier. The ride is in two weeks, and my father, who was bedridden with broken ribs and head trauma to recover from, will be riding in it on the very same bike he crashed on.
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