I lost a cycling friend today. i rode with Lois Polesky Rizzo in Florida, but she was from Long Island. She was a strong rider, an experienced rider, a triathlete, and a wonderful person.  She even completed the Lake Placid Ironman in 2011. On Monday, October 9th, while training for the Miami Man 70.4 mile triathlon, she crashed into a van that was parked in the right lane of a road that had no shoulder. She sustained a spinal cord injury and a brain injury that she could not recover from. Today, her daughters bravely took her off life support and she passed away. 

The reason I share this is because this could have been any one of us. We do not know the exact circumstance of Lois's crash, but we do know that biking requires control, quick reflexes, and complete concentration, and sometimes, for one reason or another, whether in our control at a given moment, or not, we lose it. If reading about this tragic incident causes one person to think more about what is at stake when we take to the road, Lois will have helped a fellow rider. May she Rest In Peace. I will miss her on every ride.