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Last issue, I wrote about speaking up, asking for what you want on training rides. I said that when two people ride in a rotating paceline, they're a partnership, each person helping the other by taking a turn in front.

If you let yourself become exhausted or dropped, you can't help. It's too late. You waited too long to protest the pace. You didn't speak up, didn't take care of yourself. Now you can't take a turn, can't help anyone.

Please, I asked readers, speak up if you're about to be dropped. Speak up if you're drafting someone and you realize you're going faster than you can comfortably go.

In a rare moment of inspiration, I compared that action to speaking up in a relationship, rather than silently letting things happen, then suffering the results. Speak up, I said. Don't be embarrassed, Don't be shy. Speak up.

The day after I wrote that piece, I ran into three cyclists at a café. They'd finished their ride; I was waiting for friends to begin ours. I'd heard one of them, a local coach, give a talk days earlier about cycling technique. Assuming he'd be interested, I mentioned my piece about speaking up.

A 50-year old woman cyclist at the café table said she couldn't do that, couldn't ask for what she needed.

"I was raised with four brothers," she said.

I was struck by that comment. I don't know that I ever use events that happened 40 years ago to explain why I can't do something today. Do you do that?

If you hear yourself doing that, simply saying, "Oh, I can't do that because in the '60s or '70s this-or-that happened," please ask yourself: Is everything that ever happened to you still happening? Is it ever over?

If you've been suffering in silence on your bike because of events that happened long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, try this: Imagine you're someone else when you're on the bike, someone proactive, someone LOUD. Han Solo maybe. Speak up. It'll work for ya.

This is a fact: Other people cannot read your mind. They cannot anticipate your acts or know your intentions. So - if your group has been doing the same thing for miles, going the same speed in the same direction, there is the reasonable expectation that it will continue to do so.

If you want to do something different, please announce that you are going to do it, whatever it is. Again: If you do not wish to continue to do what you have been doing, you have to alert those around you. They depend on you to do so. Their safety depends on your doing so. My safety may depend on your doing so.

Last Saturday, I rode with a group of about eight, mostly women. We rode in a double paceline on quiet roads south of Tucson, away from the maniac traffic in town.

We'd just turned a corner. As I learned later, the two front riders decided to move to the back of the group. I understand there was some confusion about how to accomplish that. Sadly, the individual who was most forceful was wrong.

That person told the rider on the right front, who'd had the good sense to move right to drop back, to move left instead, across the front wheels of the two riders immediately behind him.

Probably a little confused, without a word, without accelerating slightly, that person obediently moved left, across the wheel of the woman behind him. She slowed to keep from hitting him.

The woman behind HER could not avoid her rear wheel, hit it and fell down, boom, cutting a finger, whacking her helmet on the road and banging up her bike a bit. She got up, wrapped her finger in a clean handkerchief and knocked her brake lever straight. Back on the bike in moments. Brave woman.

Remarkably, when she got rolling again, she was not concerned with discovering what the hell had happened in front of her, causing her to fall. She was not concerned with making sure it did not happen again.

She only wanted to soothe potentially hurt feelings.

She was concerned with making sure the woman she'd hit from behind (the instant before she crashed) was not upset. Not your fault, she told her. Don't fret about it. I'm okay. These things happen.

That attitude is sweet. It may be typically feminine and it may be part of the job description of a social worker or nurse or other care-giver. It is not the attitude that will keep crashes from happening.

Most crashes are preventable. Bikes broken in crashes are useless and expensive to repair or replace. Broken bones are far worse.

We have to educate the people who hold our physical safety in their hands, the people we follow, four inches back, while they think about, well, who knows what they think about.

Everyone says education is key, communication is vital, but no one wants to say anything. Shhhh. No one wants to speak up, to sound like an authority by saying: Hey, that crash shouldn't have happened. Let's do that thing differently from now on, whattaya say?

No one learned a damn thing from that crash. There was no communication and no education.

Because no one talked about the right way to do it, no one learned how to get off the front of a side-by-side paceline. No one was reminded that bikes don't have brake lights, that you have to tell people inches behind you that you're slowing abruptly - or they will hit your bike and fall down.

No one tried to analyze why the crash happened. Finding a cause might mean learning that someone made a mistake, and that would be unthinkable. Easier to think about an occasional crash than to point a finger at someone and say, Hey, how 'bout doing that differently the next time. It'd be safer that way.

That'd be speaking up, wouldn't it?

Speaking up seems easy when you're reading about it on this page. Listen on your rides. Let me know how much education and communication actually happens.

END