When I was in high school, my younger brother was hit by a car while crossing a street on his bike. We didn't wear helmets when we rode then, and it was bad. He was in a coma for weeks with a head injury, lots of broken bones, and all kinds of serious cuts and lacerations. And he made it through. I remember coming home from school one day and my father was home from work already (which was really rare) and when I walked inside, he was smiling (which was also rare!) and said that my brother had woken up. I don't even recall how long it was since the accident, but it was quite a while. All along, the doctors has been telling us that we should look at his coma for what it was: his brain had suffered an injury and was now focusing all-hands-on-deck for recovery. Rather than waste energy maintaining other systems, it shut the body down for a while to go into full repair mode. That always made sense to me.
I bring all that up because I'm sure a lot of people know that these things can take a while, but at the same time we are all hoping Chris comes out of this really quickly. The reality is that he may be down for a while, but that' not necessarily a bad thing. He's an extremely fit and strong guy, and his body is working as hard as we all hope it is. It just needs to focus all its attention there right now. As a singlespeeder, I think he'd appreciate that perspective. Riding one gear forces you to be efficient: use momentum when you can and power only when you have to. That's what his body is doing - it's being efficient - just like he's trained it to do!
When I saw Norm's post from last night, it occurred to me that I actually have a lot of things that come to mind from riding with Chris. I've ridden with him quite a bit over the last few years -- from stop-and-go casual group rides in Philly to winter frozen hammerfests at Wharton. And I've raced against him many more. He's been a marker for me for a while - we've gone back and forth in placing at races for a while now. But he's much more well-rounded than I am because, simply put, he's faster. On "normal distances", he will always destroy me. If I want to have a chance of beating him, I need a race to be really, really long and maybe I'll outlast him. But not always - one race where he showed his knack for endurance in particular would be the second Stewart Six Pack (I think it was 2012 maybe?) It was a brutally hot day. I pitted with Chris and Mitch along the roadway. I remember before the race, we were giving Chris shit because he was carrying like five bottles and had one of those triathlete food boxes on his bike. I asked him why he didn't just strap a picnic basket to his back. But Chris said that he was intent on making the podium, so he didn't want to stop at all to swap bottles or grab food. So the race goes off and it was basically a battle of attrition from the start. I sat down after four or five laps because I felt like someone had lit in a fire inside my head. When they came through, I told Chris and Mitch that I was done for the day so I'd pit for them if they wanted. A little while before the six hour mark hit, it was probably 95 degrees with like 98% humidity and I'm feeling like I'm getting heat exhaustion just sitting there. And then Chris came through and stopped at the pit. He looked like ass. Every vein in the dude's body was popping out and his eyes were sunken in and he basically looked like a zombie on meth. He had one lap left but mentioned that he was really hurting. So I popped the top off my cooler, which was filled with ice brine and told him to dunk his arms in, thinking that might cool him off a bit. He did and as soon as that water hit his wrists and elbows, it was like a switch turned on him. He snapped out of his meth-zombie thing and looked turbo-charged. I told him to stay there for a minute but he said that he was chasing a podium spot and hopped back on his bike and took off. I thought he might go nuclear somewhere out on the course, but in the end, he got his podium and he freaking murdered that last lap. It was one of the toughest performances I've ever seen. For all intent and purposes, he was done when he stopped at the cooler, but he found that little extra to push one more lap and nail down a top three for the day. That's a level of tough you don't see too often.