Day 36: Yuma, CO to Fort Morgan, CO

• Distance: 33.33 mi personal, 61.07 mi team
• Elevation: 702 ft personal, 1,007 ft team
• Dedication: Our hosts’ daughter, Bridget, and Uncle Tim
• Ride group: Richa, Maggie, Eli, MJay, and Chase
• Host: United Methodist Church

Another hard day on 4K! If you’ve been following along, you’ve probably noticed that even the easy days usually end up being hard in some capacity. Today was a day where I woke up feeling really defeated and like I couldn’t handle the physical or mental demands of this trip. The beauty of 4K is that none of us do this alone– I don’t know if Julia could tell I was struggling, but she made me feel a little less hopeless by dedicating her day to Uncle Tim (which did make me cry, but I felt better after). Thankfully I ended up feeling better physically today than I did yesterday, but it was quite the day for my team.

We started early again to beat the heat, which was forecasted to reach 110º at the hottest part of the day. Our route featured a gradual uphill for 25 miles, followed by a mostly downhill ride for the remaining 35 miles. We were also dealing with a crosswind most of the day which made the ride harder than it needed to be.

The morning was relatively uneventful. Shelby got me another cinnamon roll, we picked some sunflowers, saw a very fresh newborn cow, and took some pictures with some funny signs along the way. Here’s a photo dump for the day because I took all my pictures in the morning:

Not long after we completed most of our climbing for the day my ride group had a pretty serious accident. We were riding very close together so that we could draft and suffer less in the wind when Maggie accidentally clipped MJay’s rear tire. It is incredibly difficult to recover from bumping your front wheel and Maggie went down instantly. Richa and I were riding side-by-side behind her and had no time or choice but to go over her and her bike. I was thankfully riding on the inside of the shoulder and was able to swerve just enough to only run over her rear tire and land in the grass; Richa unfortunately took a hard spill on the pavement. I was able to get up immediately but Richa was in immense pain on the shoulder, while Maggie was able to move off the road but was bleeding a lot.

At that point I jumped into director mode and the rest of my group snapped into action as well. Some good samaritans stopped to make sure we were okay and blocked traffic while Chase (one of our med students) got to bandaging Maggie. Richa initially expected her shoulder was dislocated so there was nothing for us to do but try to make her more comfortable while we waited for an ambulance.

I rode with Richa to a hospital in Fort Morgan. Despite the scary circumstances, I had a nice conversation with the ambulance driver. I explained our trip and he told me about his niece, Kaylee Remmich, a 12-year-old girl who passed from cancer last year. He was also kind enough to give me a donation before he left the hospital.

I spent several hours at the hospital with Richa; a lot happened but at the end of the day she had a fractured collarbone and a small puncture in her lung which meant they need to keep her overnight for observation. I feel so terribly for her but she is also one of the strongest people on the team, so I know she’ll get through this.

Throughout all of this my teammates were very supportive. I am 100% unscathed (seriously, not even a scratch), but it is pretty traumatic to wreck your bike and see your friends in immense pain for hours on end. I’ve now witnessed both major crashes on this trip, neither of which were fun, but it has been good for me to be there as a director. There’s a lot we need to document and directors are supposed to accompany injured people to the hospital, so having me there from the beginning speeds things up a bit. The host van team dropped off some food for me and Richa and offered to trade off with me but I wanted to stay so I could keep her dad updated. I ended up leaving with Bailey and Maggie, who also came to the ER later to get Maggie’s wounds checked out.

After showering and getting some pizza I went to get ice cream and then stopped for some drinks with Jake and Santi while a lot of people went to see the new Thor movie. The bartender was very interested in our ride and was overall a very funny and kind guy– although he did admit to being rude to some of our riders when he passed us in his truck yesterday (in retrospect I may have returned an equally rude gesture to this man…). He was genuinely interested in our trip though, so hopefully we convinced him to be a little kinder to cyclists in the future. We were the only people there so he bought us all a drink and shared some pizza and wings, too!

We’re turning in relatively early again to get another early start tomorrow. I think we’re all focusing on resting up for the Rockies in the coming days, too!

Until tomorrow!

Lauren