Tragic Loss

It was around 10:30 last night when I saw the post by Kyle, "Pray for my little buddy Justin Addison. He was hit while riding today along the St. Tammany trace."   He was coming out of surgery and my initial impression was that he'd had a punctured lung and broken leg. Later that night another post sounded far worse, indicating that he had coded during surgery and they had needed to remove one of his lungs, and that he was now in the ICU.  I knew he and his family would have a rough night.  My phone's battery had gotten so low that it had shut itself down, so when I took it off the charger this morning I just stuck it into my pocket and headed out for the early levee ride.  When I arrived I told a few of the riders waiting there in the dark about the accident. We started the ride and picked up a few more people along the way.  One of those was Woody, and it was probably fifteen minutes later that he told me that Justin had died some time after midnight.

The news was difficult to take.  Justin was one of the area's up and coming Junior riders, competing mostly in Cat. 4 races last year.  He'd come to the club's winter training camp with his friend and classmate Robert Monahan, and on the Saturday ride the two of them had basically ridden most of us right off their wheels.  Justin shuttled between New Orleans and Covington, and often rode the weekend Giro rides with us.  He was always smiling, always upbeat, and fun to be around, and if you didn't know he was only 17, you'd have guessed from his height and demeanor that he was a college student.  He was out on a training ride yesterday evening, heading east on the Tammany Trace bike path when he was hit by an SUV at one of the intersections.  Traffic there is very light, but visibility at that particular spot, coming from that particular direction, was probably hindered by the underbrush growing alongside the converted railway, and although the cars have right-of-way at most of those intersections, most of us would probably have rolled through with little more than a glance each way.  I don't know exactly what happened there in the late evening, but I know we've all had our moments of inattention and we've all been surprised by those cars we didn't see, and every one of us is probably thinking, "That could have been me."  So I hope we will all be a little more careful out there, both when we're on our bikes and when we're in our cars.  This sport that Justin and we love so much can be dangerous, and although we may accept that and try not to dwell on it, we must not forget.

I remember mailing off for the first Bell Biker helmets, before they were available in stores, shortly after a riding friend and teammate who had moved to Atlanta hit his head and died as a result of a freak fall while riding around a corner on his way to the grocery store. A few months later I caught the edge of a leaf-covered road in the park and smashed that helmet's styrofoam against my skull.  Over the years I've broken at least five helmets, suffering one concussion serious enough to render me unconscious, and although you might notice me leaving a little extra room ahead of my front tire when things get sketchy on the training rides, I'm still out there racing.  Life is risky, riding is risky, I accept it, try to minimize it, and as always, hope for the best.  So did Justin.