one day in Fruita

This is one BAMF! He's my old (and yes, he is old!) colleague from my previous working stint at Inside Communications, which is now Competitor Group. At the time, Mark Gouge (Gougie) and I were the ad sales team for Inside Triathlon magazine. We shared office space with the ad sales guys at Velo News magazine and so the crew of us become a tight knit group. Once each year, typically in the spring, we ventured off the beaten path and took an ad pit retreat into the mountains in hopes of finding warmer weather and some sweet singletrack.

The pic above shows Gougie standing by the site of the most horrifying crash I have witnessed in person. Me, Gougie and Nick Ramey were all jostling for position and doing what guys do best and trying to drop one another out on the trail. Gougie pecked his way in front of Nick and I and was tearing through the singletrack like a man possessed until he jumped off a rock ledge with too much gusto and smacked head first into the stone wall he is standing in front of in this picture. Nick and I were only 5 to 10 meters behind but we halted at the ledge and watched in horror as we thought we had just witnessed Gougie end his life.

We rushed down to him and Nick bent down and picked him up by his shoulder...POP. The good news was Gougie was alive and without any head or spine trauma. The bad news, he had severely separated his shoulder and broken his collar bone.

As the 6 or 7 other riders trickled in and saw Gougie cussing up a storm (not to mention he was trying to convince anyone who would listen that he could mount his bike again and ride it back to the trailhead), we knew he had to get back and get medical attention before he lost his mind.

Enter Saint Greg Thomas. Greg was Gougie's ex-teammate during their adventure racing days and had competed in an Eco Challenge so we gave him the task of ushering Gougie back to the trailhead where our cars were parked. This was only two or three miles, but walking along while tending to a gimpy arm and balancing two mountain bikes would take them over an hour.

For better or worse, Gougie made the rest of us finish the rest of our scheduled loop, and we not only finished it, but still caught them before they reached the cars.

Fast forward nearly three years and this BAMF had the cojones to travel back to the site of his crash with his remarkable better-half, Beth, on their mountain bike vacation to Fruita this past week. I hope he shuddered when he saw this spot, but knowing Gougie, he was thinking how he wished Nick and I were there riding with him so he could outsprint us to the ledge before jumping and making a clean landing.**

Gougie, I'm eating another bowl of Jamaican Coconut ice cream in honor of you and your BAMF-ness!

-LF

** I just received a message from Beth on Facebook that Gougie crashed again this past weekend and may have broken a rib. No sympathy from this guy (or from Beth as far as I could tell)!