More Mikey

 The title of my last post had me thinking of someone that my friend Mary Lynn and I knew. When anyone asks Mar and me how we know each other, our pat response is, "We have a dead friend in common." If you also knew Mike Patrick, you know we couldn't pay him a more appropriate honor than to say something so inappropriate. One of Mike's graces was the ability to say exactly the wrong thing while knowing how wrong it was.

I first met Mike on the start line of the New England Series race at the Ludwig Farm in Ellington, CT in 1994. It was a big regional race with at least fifty riders lined up a couple rows deep fifty yards away from a fence opening that would allow for the width of two riders. It was going to be a fast start, and while I wasn't yet winning those races, after finishing second at the Mount Snow national earlier that summer, to some even younger kid named Floyd Landis, I felt reasonable taking a spot on the front row.

Mike lined up next to me and started talking non-stop about how it was his first expert category race after upgrading, how nervous he was, and maybe a few derisive comments about the sport category riders he'd previously been racing. Much later I'd learn how fortunate I was he didn't vomit on my shoes, which apparently was a repeated experience of his competition when he'd been nervous before BMX races a decade or more earlier. At the time, I was just thinking, but didn't say: if this is your first expert race, maybe you lining up on the second row would suit you, and the rest of us, better.

The race started and I didn't see him again that day, so I was surprised later that week when the owner of Pig Iron, the bike shop that supported my racing, asked me about my friend Mike who had contacted the shop about sponsorship and name dropped me. Who? Oh, that guy! I don't really know him, but his thinking is, maybe, a little grandiose, taking a spot on the front of the line and claiming we're friends.

Pig Iron gave him a spot on the team anyway, and I maintained my reservations, but when he offered me a ride up to a race at Coyote Hill in northern Vermont on a weekend when I didn't know of anything else scheduled, I was sensible and didn't refuse the free ride, even if it might entail six hours of the yacking I'd experienced on that start line. A free ride is a free ride. 

Without the immediate pre race jitters, Mike still talked a lot, but I discovered there was a depth behind what he had to say, once you survived the initial feeling of being offended. I wasn't alone in thinking that. His wife at the time first met him after calling the police about his disturbances next door! Mike was a sober alcoholic and I imagine he was even more unmanageable before reaching sobriety. After that trip, we were good friends.

A few years later, Mike started blacking out when riding hard, and when he regained consciousness, he would be confused about where he was. A doctor diagnosed him with "petite male" seizures and told him to stop riding hard. Yeah, right, that wasn't going to happen, so the seizures kept happening and eventually a new doctor sensibly ordered a CT scan and found the brain tumor. I won't advocate for not listening to doctors, but not all of them are worth it. If Mike hadn't continued to push on the bike, and push back against the medical prognosis, the tumor would've progressed even further.

Mike had surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, and being Mike, would later talk about how he wanted chemo again, because the weight loss that resulted gave him the best race results he ever had, and if you knew Mike, you know that's some of the slightest of inappropriate things he'd say. Alas, I keep writing "knew", past tense, because he relapsed and the tumor returned after a number of years, and he didn't survive. 

Yes, I was amazingly fortunate to find mountain bike racing, and a big part of that was the people I met, not just the privilege of being paid to do something most people pay to do. Mike was one of those people, and maybe with a better timed CT scan order, racing a bike would have been exactly what caused early enough detection to save his life. I don't know. I am glad I knew Mike.