Life Updates

Woke up to a grey, crisp morning eager to get on the road. After a nice oatmeal breakfast, I hit the road. It misted all morning, but it never really rained on me and with the temperatures under 70 degrees I made really good time without any worry of overheating.

After a few hills coming out of the mountains, the land really opened up back into flat farm land and not much else.

I woke up to a beautiful dawn over the lake and enjoyed a great breakfast of oatmeal and tea. I left the camp refreshed for the very short and very flat ride into Frederick. With almost no wind, I covered the distance in a couple of hours and arrived in Frederick before 10 AM. It was obvious that the rumors about the effort Frederick had made in anticipation of Freewheel were true. Various businesses had decorated bicycles and scattered them around town.

I got a really early start this morning. My mother drove us into Elk City for a fast food breakfast and then she gave me a bit of a head start by getting me through some busy highway driving first. But now it was time to see if I could really make this happen.

Well, it was like Sunday had never happened. My legs felt great and I started eating into the miles. Then, the gods really smiled upon me and granted me the rarest of favors, a north wind in June. I was half way through by 9:30 in the morning. With my confidence restored I was really able to start enjoying the ride.

Today was my first scheduled day off, and I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to be extremely lazy. Woke up to a beautiful sunrise and had some nice oatmeal for breakfast. Then, I went back to bed.:)

I repeated this system of getting up, eating a bit and going back to sleep for most of the day. Which is about the perfect way to spend a vacation day.

Or Where Our Intrepid Hero Questions His Choices Or Do I Really Need That?

So after a long night of cramping and hydrating, I woke up with at least enough confidence to continue the ride but now I had to figure out how to make that happen. Grace had offered to wake up super early on Tuesday and drive me out to Red Rock again, but that would have required me to ride every day for the rest of the week and I wasn’t sure I would be up for that. My mother the offered to drive me out to Foss Lake where I could pick up the schedule so sorely messed up the day before. This struck me as the best idea and I took her up on it, but before we left I had to cut some weight from my bags.

Or Disaster Strikes Or Where Our Intrepid Hero Gets Bit on the Backside by Hubris Or What Were You Thinking???

I don’t know about you, but I find that the week before a vacation can be more stressful and busy that any of the weeks preceding it. There always seems to be too much to do and so the night before is always a mess of chaos and frayed nerves. This trip was no different except that I was tired from my ride during the day. It was in this frame of mind that I made my first foolish choice. Instead of fighting through the sleepiness and finishing everything up that night or even more intelligently, rescheduling the ride for the next day, I decided to just finish packing and put off my “work work” till the next morning.

Or, Things Start Looking Rocky but are Ignored Through Enthusiasm for the Adventure.

It is a sign that it has been a troubled trip when it is almost a week in before I start posting trip reports, however things are improving greatly and I have the time and the energy to start catching up. Saturday was a day that I had been dreading for sometime. I had volunteered to lead any of this year’s Freewheel training rides that no one else picked up. Unfortunately, this left me with the 70 mile training ride the day before I was scheduled to head out on my trip. We tried and tried to find someone to take the ride for me, but to no avail.

I don’t often put out fundraising pleas to this blog, but this is a cause worthy of all the attention I can muster.  As fellow Oklahomans, you know all to well the severe impact that diabetes is having on our community.  As of 2010, more than 10% of the Oklahoma population had been diagnosed with some form of diabetes, far greater than the national average.  That doesn’t even begin to count the large numbers people who have the disease but remain undiagnosed.   Diabetes is, without a doubt, one of the largest health problems affecting our state.

Many of you have expressed upset, if not downright dismay, at the lack of head shaving from me this year. While I really enjoyed the St. Baldrick’s Day event, this year I am serving on the organizing committee for the Tour de Cure ride in Mustang, Oklahoma. This ride raises critical funding for diabetes research for the American Diabetes Association. As of 2010, over 10% of Oklahoman’s have been diagnosed with some form of diabetes and many more remain undiagnosed. This far outstrips the national average and it one of the most critical health issues facing our state. So, to do my part, I am going to be riding the 62 mile distance on June 23rd in Mustang, OK.

I was tired on the way to work.  Then I had to work a 13 hour day.  Then I had to ride home in the dark, after midnight, while facing a 15-20 mph headwind.  So today I learned that cycling while exhausted is completely possible . . .