Robin racing track.

Proctor is this weekend. After what happened to Beth last year, the road race is off. Just crits. Very short crits for the women [15 minutes!?!?!]. A lot of my teammates are going, but I'm not. Even if the race were a reasonable length, I couldn't. All I can think of is Beth joking around in the hotel room, Beth in the hospital on life support.

My teammate Robin was doored last week. She was riding in the bike lane when a car stopped in traffic opened the passenger side door right in front of her and the impact threw her into a steel girder supporting the El. She ended up with 7 or so broken ribs and internal bleeding [not to mention a destroyed bike]. The people who caused her accident drove off without even checking to see if she were OK. Which she wasn't. They left her lying in the street barely able to breathe from the intense pain and a partially collapsed lung. In the ER - after liberal doses of morphine - I asked if she'd passed out and she said she WISHED she'd passed out. The pain was unbearable.

Those thoughtless and criminally selfish jerks just fill me with rage. I want to channel that [non-productively] into personally beating the crap out of them. Perhaps [productively] spreading this around will suffice:


I really hope that Robin doesn't give up racing. I've seen other teammates crash and never recover their desire to compete. I can understand that, I just really, really hope Robin sticks with it. She was so into cycling and was really gaining strength and speed. We'd been training together on the Lakefront that morning and everyone noticed. This is a big setback, especially right at the beginning, I hope racing isn't another casualty of this crash.

On the other hand, Brian, my teammate who crashed so badly at camp, was on my long ride on Saturday looking strong and feeling good. Anodyne.