My column: Thank you to a friend. Remembering Rick Spence.

My column: Thank you to a friend. Remembering Rick Spence.

Forty-four is too young to leave this world.

But I am not God.

Sitting at my friend’s funeral (talk about a surreal experience), I decided to write something about him. Something from my heart. Something I wish I had the foresight to give to him before.

* * *

I lost a friend to heaven a week or so ago. And the more I’ve thought about him and our relationship, it occurred to me there was one thing I never thanked him for. So here goes,

Dear Rick,

Remember the day I stopped you and Karen after church? I had heard you were the athletic type and wanted to pick your brain about the sport of triathlon. Talking that day in the heat of June midday you offered, “There’s a great race at the beach end of August, you’ll be ready if you start training now.”

Training. What the heck? I’d heard of training puppies and training bras but training me? I envisioned a little swim and a few bike rides. Surely, we were going to ease into this thing, right?

Wrong.

Within 24 hours, I was at your pool in Bostwick trying to swim a lap. Struggling like a wildebeest snared by a phantom crocodile, how was I going to swim a half-mile in the Gulf? “Relax your head in the water,” you offered.  Then giving me a buoy to stick between my legs, I caught my breath and paddled a few more laps.

Leaving your pool with one of your mountain bikes stuffed in my car, you told me to ride to Rutledge the next day. Ride to Rutledge? Last time I checked, there are no sidewalks to Rutledge. And if I made it there from Madison – that meant riding all the way back. But you believed in me or my body’s ability, so the next day I headed out. Much to my relief, I made it.

“Did you sign-up for the race?” you asked one afternoon. Hmm. Like sign-up for real? “Go ahead and register, you’ll be ready.” I pulled up the web site to see a photograph featuring the backs of dozens of green swim caps staring out at the ocean. A very rough rolling sea, I might add. Wait. This was moving way too fast. I heard your voice say, “You’ll be ready, Jamie.” And with a click of a mouse, it was done.

“Time for a road bike.”  A road bike? I liked my (your) mountain bike just fine and the daily trips to Rutledge didn’t seem so far anymore. Road bikes go much faster and that only meant one thing, hitting the asphalt on Dixie Highway at a higher rate of speed. This road bike thing got better. “You have to get clips.” I learned that clips are things cyclists have on the bottom of bike shoes locking their foot onto the pedals.  Super. Moving 20 mph (Okay, more like 14 mph with a tailwind.), clipped to bike equaled a tangled mess of me, metal and roadway. But soon after, I bought a bike with clips and started riding beyond Dixie Highway into parts of the county I’d never seen. Chased by dogs, narrowly missed by cars and stranded with flat tires, everything always seemed to work out no matter what fix I got myself into.

“We need to swim in open water before the race.” You explained the pull and swells of the tides were much different that the sterile pool environment. So a group of us gathered goggles and swim caps and jumped into the lake. Twenty minutes out and twenty minutes back, you plowed through the water in the lead. It was choppy, I was tired and in spite of the fact there wasn’t a dark blue line on the bottom of Lake Oconee – I made it.

That’s what I want to thank you for Rick. You changed my life. That first summer six years ago learning how to swim, bike and run together – I learned that fears never go away.  You just have to push through them and when you look back on the other side  — things weren’t nearly as bad as imagined. No, you didn’t give me freedom from fears but now I walk into them when everything inside my head screams to run the other way.

Of the many challenges I want to scale in life, there will be that point: will I jump into swim a mile in foot-and-a-half-chop or sleep-in? Even after a number of triathlons if the water’s rough race on morning, I’m still terrified. Just like that last race we all did together. The water was gray and churning like a washing machine the day before. I woke up in the middle of the night and told John I couldn’t do it. He sighed, rolled over and went back to sleep. Race morning, calm on the outside, nervous as cottontail staring down a timber rattler in my gut, I ran into the water and finish the race just fine. Then we all celebrated that night like so many times before.

I miss you terribly,  we all do. And this Biggest Chicken east of Marietta, isn’t such a fraidy-cat anymore. Well, I probably am but I sure don’t let it stop me from doing things. Thank you for that my mountain of a friend. Look forward to celebrating the end of the race with you again.

After the 2009 Sandestin Triathlon. (L-R) Nameless friend of someone (sorry), Dan Newton, Bud Martin, Joe Cardwell, Rick Spence, Karen Spence, a very happy me, Rebecca Gill and Chanin Gill.