FFS Fridays: Lost Friends and Blood Pipes

FFS. It is Friday, finally, and this is what this week has felt like:

I kid, I kid. We actually have no idea whether T-Rex was actually that color. The wine, well, depending on your poison.

Today marks the third anniversary of our fallen comrade and community member Jon Lennard’s passing. His memory rides with me still today; I have lost a certain innocence, that invincible feeling that bad things only happen to people whose lives are farther removed. Jon reminds me every day that Cycling is a risk and that if I’m not a lot careful and a little lucky, it could be my last ride. I wish these lessons could be taught in another way, and maybe other can learn in more practical ways, but for me that lesson came through @itburns’ sacrifice. I still struggle to understand that I could miss someone in this way, someone I’d never met. That sentence, by the way, is clumsy. But I think he’d have liked it that way; he’d have made fun of it in his way, that assertively humble style of his that always made me laugh.

Speaking of comrades, check out the blood pipes on Mr Alfa Lum here. This is the team that was my favorite in 1989, and one which I blame for introducing EPO into the European Pro peloton. Those guns; mercy me, thems are some Iron Curtains right there. And could anyone ever be any more Casually Deliberate? How do you rest so jauntily on so rakish a top tube? Rooskies, that’s who.

FFS. It’s Friday. Enjoy the weekend, get on the bike, and remember our fallen comrade, Jon Lennard. We miss you, my friend.

frank

The founder of Velominati and curator of The Rules, Frank was born in the Dutch colonies of Minnesota. His boundless physical talents are carefully canceled out by his equally boundless enthusiasm for drinking. Coffee, beer, wine, if it’s in a container, he will enjoy it, a lot of it. He currently lives in Seattle. He loves riding in the rain and scheduling visits with the Man with the Hammer just to be reminded of the privilege it is to feel completely depleted. He holds down a technology job the description of which no-one really understands and his interests outside of Cycling and drinking are Cycling and drinking. As devoted aesthete, the only thing more important to him than riding a bike well is looking good doing it. Frank is co-author along with the other Keepers of the Cog of the popular book, The Rules, The Way of the Cycling Disciple and also writes a monthly column for the magazine, Cyclist. He is also currently working on the first follow-up to The Rules, tentatively entitled The Hardmen. Email him directly at rouleur@velominati.com.

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  • @itburns passed away before I found the path of Velominati but I have absorbed enough of his presence through archived articles etc to understand the effect he had on everyone, and the shockwaves caused by his death; I think about him quite often when I ride.

    Similarly, my 'real' club lost a racer in a local road race just before I joined. The fact I didn't know the guy and wasn't part of the club when he died doesn't mean I don't feel the loss (especially considering the circumstances), and I think about him most times I ride and every time I race.

    I'll be out tonight and I'll take a moment to remember Jon and Ben, two guys I never knew but whose deaths while riding has cast a shadow onto my own cycling, and I'll ride hard, ride safe and ride home.

     

  • @Oli

    @markpa
    Mr Alfa Lum = good old Andrei Tchmil, bless him.

    Fuck, that's three-monument-winner Tchmil!?!?!  I did not even recognize him!

    Thanks once more, Oli!!!

  • @markpa

    Mr Alfa Lum certainly has his Casually Deliberate down, as if James Dean had ridden a bike.

    James Dean -- I think his fly is open.

  • Scary, did not know until now that @itburns died 3 years ago, I have been reading comments from him on various articles. Still makes me chuckle when I see his Gollum-avatar.

  • Somebody please explain how Andrei could possibly shave those legs without causing a deep red (oxygen-rich) geyser. No doubt a laconic response with a butterfly Band-Aid would choke it off.  As a skinny kid in high school, I was anything but casual about my deliberate attempts to get even one vein in my biceps to pop like those pipes- by curling barbells in front of a mirror!

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