Several minutes before the start I asked one of the other cyclists what pace he planned to ride. I don’t remember what he told me, but I remember thinking it sounded a little slow. Enough socializing; it was time to focus. I intended to ride the course quickly. It wasn’t a race, but I would be racing the clock to meet my goal. My bike was clean, tuned and lubricated. My tires had just the right pressure. My shoes were snug but not tight. I hadn’t trained enough, but other than that, I was ready. This was my first organized ride and I had signed up for the 100-mile course. Having ridden this distance once before, I was feeling good about it. As they called for the 100-mile group to start, I worked on getting toward the front of the pack and staying there. However, after several minutes it was clear that the front of the pack was in much better shape than I was and I couldn’t keep up. So, I changed my approach. I would just focus on the course and ride it as efficiently as I could. After settling into a more manageable pace, the ride was kind of like flowing in a current. Since we were still near the start, the riders had not yet spread out too much. I wasn’t accustomed to riding close to other cyclists. I always either rode by myself or with my wife, but never close together. Somewhere within the first five miles, a guy who had been riding about 50 yards ahead turned back. Now he was riding the opposite direction off to the side saying he thought we had passed the first rest stop. Apparently there was either a rest stop or something that he mistook for a rest stop, not directly beside the road, but further from the road than you would expect. In order to get to it, you would have to make a right-hand turn and ride 70 yards or so. A rider behind me heard that we may have missed a rest stop and slowed down causing the woman behind him to crash into his bike. She and her bike went to the ground, but she got up and was okay. Eventually, people spread out and I was riding solo as I was accustomed to. Some miles later the course became a long straight road into the wind. This stretch was going to be slow and tiring, so I took an opportunity to join a tight pack of riders. I got in really close behind one of them and just matched their pace for miles. They were friendly and it was fun riding through the wide-open plain as a tight group. At one of the rest stops, I knew I didn’t have much time to reach a certain turn before it was closed. If I didn’t make the turn by the deadline, I would have to continue straight and finish the ride on the 50-mile course. I put some Powerade in my water bottles, grabbed some snacks, and continued solo, pushing toward that turn. A little while later, I made it. Things were looking good. As the long ride went on, I started to get tired and uncomfortable. It helped to changed my position on the bike here and there, but the discomfort was significant. As I continued, my back and neck were hurting. The pain wasn’t too bad, but over the past couple of hours I had gone from feeling good and strong to really tired and wanting to get off the bike and the day was uncomfortably warmer and warmer. At some point, I lost track of how far along I was on the course, but I knew I had a long way to go. Miles down the road I was even more tired and uncomfortable, so I decided I would lay down under a tree at the next rest stop and take a long break. As I continued, looking forward to that next rest stop, I saw one of the riders sitting by the road leaned back against an embankment. I called out to him as I passed to see if he needed help. He said he was waiting to be picked up, so I kept going. Soon he would be sitting in an air-conditioned car being carried along effortlessly at 40 or 50 miles per hour. Further along there was a woman standing with her bike on the side of the road. I checked with her too, and she said she had a flat tire. She didn’t feel too sure of changing the tube herself, and I wasn’t so sure of my ability either. I was riding a Cervelo R3, my first modern road bike. When I bought it used it had a set of Continental Gatorskin tires. My only experience fixing a flat on a modern road bike had involved removing and reinstalling those Gatorskins, and it had been very difficult to get the especially tight-fitting Gatorskins back on the rim. I told her I wasn’t good at fixing flats, but I would try to help. Fortunately, someone else came along who was very sure of his flat-fixing skills. I was happy to let him do it, and soon another rider stopped. Now we were a group of four, three people watching a guy fix a flat tire. Not at all eager to get back on my bike, it was nice to stand around for a few minutes. Soon the guy had finished changing the tube and he suggested to the woman that maybe they could hang out sometime. The four of us were back on the road and riding as a group. However, we were not a group of equally fit riders. The woman was faster than us and therefore had been ahead of us when she got a flat tire. She rode with the group long enough to be friendly, as we had stopped to help her, then she broke away from the pack to ride faster. I didn’t care about speed at this point. I cared about laying in the shade under a tree. I eventually arrived at the next rest stop, to a land flowing with Powerade, bananas and cookies, a land with shade trees good for laying under. Another rider arrived right after I did and he wasn’t doing too well. I’m not sure if he was having leg cramps or some other issue. People had to help him get off his bike and into a chair. I don’t know if he continued after that rest stop, but he was amongst friendly volunteers who were helping him. As I was getting my pre-siesta snacks and stuff, I heard one of the volunteers say we were only six miles from the finish. I had no idea we were that close. Those words had an immediate and powerful effect on my mind and my perceived energy level. As if my strength were instantly renewed, I quickly ate, drank some Powerade, filled up my water bottles and got back on the course, pushing hard toward the finish. I passed a young couple, then a little further down the road I passed another rider. The final miles passed by and soon I was back in the little town we had started in. I passed another rider and was feeling the excitement of finishing. As I came around a corner I could see the school, the home base for the ride. However, as I passed by the school I didn’t see a finish line as I had expected, so I kept going. My wife, who had been waiting under a tree at the school, saw me pass by. I didn’t see a finish line anywhere, so I figured the school was the finish line. After I had turned around and returned to the entrance to the school’s parking lot, the next rider had arrived at the finish. It was one of the guys from the group who had stopped to help with the flat tire. He and I had been at the last rest stop together. Later I saw that the woman with the flat tire had finished the ride and was now running laps in the parking lot. My target finish time had come and gone a long time ago, and I think I was among the last several riders to finish that day. All in all, it was one of my best cycling experiences.

On the morning of Thanksgiving 2023, my wife and I drove a short distance to my hometown where we would spend the day with family. We arrived at my parents' house a few hours early so my dad and I would have a chance to go target shooting. Ever since I bought a handgun a year or two earlier, shooting had become a regular activity for us. It was a shared interest and something we enjoyed doing together. Shortly after arriving at my parents' house, my dad and I left in his car for the local gun club. When we got to the gun club, we were the only ones there. This was common and something I liked about shooting there. The club was in town, but it felt like it was in the country. It was mostly surrounded by woods and located on a road that had very little traffic. On one end, there was an area with steel targets such as hanging circular plates. One of the targets was a dueling tree, a vertical column with circular targets on either side. If you hit one of the circular targets, it would swing around behind the center column and come to rest on the opposite side. A year or two earlier I had bought my first handgun, a Ruger LCP Max. I chose the LCP because it is very small, easy to conceal and convenient to carry. However, since small handguns can be hard to shoot, and since I had not yet learned a key principle that would improve my shooting, I wasn't able to consistently shoot that little gun with the accuracy I wanted. Having watched a lot of good reviews of the Smith and Wesson Shield Plus, I bought one. On this Thanksgiving Day trip to the gun club, my Shield Plus was still new and I hadn't shot it very much. At one point I was taking my turn and I decided to shoot at the dueling tree, the one with the circles that swing from one side to the other. I took a few shots with the Shield Plus and was hitting the targets. The gun felt good in my hands and the more percussive 9mm pop made it fun to shoot. I was really enjoying the Shield Plus, mostly because it was easier to shoot. My dad and I continued to take turns shooting and were having a good time. Eventually, we heard some cars coming. A guy that my dad and I know had brought a bunch of his extended family to the gun club. He came over and said hello then returned to his group. At one point I took another turn shooting at the dueling tree. I was enjoying being able to hit the targets and began trying to move from one circle to the next more quickly. In doing this, my aim crossed the center column several times. As I tried to shoot faster, one of my shots was really bad. I took a shot and the bullet, perhaps just a fragment of the bullet, came back to me. As I remember it, I saw the fragment coming toward me, reflecting the sunlight as it was about ten feet away. I remember hearing it as well. I imagine a flattened or jagged fragment would make a sound if moving quickly enough through the air, but I don't know that I would have actually heard that with my ear protection on. As the fragment reached me, I was still in a shooting stance with both arms extended, aiming the gun at the target. I felt it graze my left forearm. I looked at my arm and went back to the bench where my dad was. It looked like someone had drawn a half-inch straight line with a red pen on my forearm. I told my dad what had happened, and we decided to call it a day. We went back to my parents' house where we would soon have a nice Thanksgiving dinner. The next day I asked my wife to take a picture of me while I stood in a shooting stance as if I were shooting at the target again. The line on my arm was consistent with the path of a bullet or fragment coming from the direction of the target. My dad went back to the gun club that next day and took a careful look at the target. He saw there was a small fresh nick in the horizontal center of the target's center column. The column was a sturdy piece of angle iron with a rounded 90-degree bend. So, the leading edge of the angle iron, the surface of the column closest to the shooter wasn't a sharp 90-degree corner, but a smooth rounded corner. A small point on the center of the column was more similar to a flat surface than a sharp 90-degree bend. My bad shot was perfectly bad in a sense, as it hit the center column right in the middle of its rounded leading edge. While lots of people use steel targets, I decided to no longer use them. This experience has helped me become a better and safer shooter as I am now much more mindful of the situations in which there is potential for ricochet.