Thursday, August 6, 2009

Thousands Living Strong - the Legacy of Susan Nelson

For those of you who don't already know, Susan Nelson passed away last night. Susan was the wife of blogger Elden "Fat Cyclist" Nelson. Others are already saying what an inspiration they have both been much better than I could. I am sad, but thanks to them we can all aspire to "Fight Like Susan".

I just wanted to point out that at time of writing the number of comments on Fat Cyclist's blog post about Susan's passing was 1,143. That's just the people who chose to leave a note and who have heard the sad news so far. The number of people she touched and inspired is absolutely staggering, as is the amount of money Elden and Team Fatty have raised for cancer research. The whole family should be insanely proud, and I wish them all the best in this difficult time.

Fight Like Susan.


R A N T W I C K
PS - On Monday August 10, that comment number was up to 2402. Thousands indeed.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Ottawa Cyclists - Condition Update

As some of you may be aware, a group of 5 Ottawa cyclists were the victims of a hit and run recently. I have had trouble finding out how the 5 are doing, thanks to media that aren't really into following up. The main reason that I wanted to know was that when I looked at my site stats quite a lot of people were landing on RANTWICK after doing google searches on variations of "5 Ottawa Cyclists Killed".

One of my big concerns about incidents like this, beyond the recovery of the victims, is that people will see it as confirmation that cycling is dangerous. Statistics do not bear that out, but many people assume that if 5 cyclists got run over, 5 cyclists got killed.

The most recent information I have been able to find thus far is that 1 cyclist has been discharged from hospital, while 4 remain in. I do not know the extent of their injuries or how things look for them, but I wanted to point out that none of the five were killed, and we can all continue to hope and pray for them.

Thanks to Les Faber of cyclemania.ca for giving me at least this small bit of information.

Keep riding all over the place,

R A N T W I C K
P.S. You smart-alecky types (you know who you are) who are about to point out that this is Wednesday instead of Monday, don't bother. Mondays will be for my long weird posts with pictures and video and nonsense and other stuff. This was just a quick update.