the sound and the fury
You should go and preregister right now. Seriously. Go for it. I’ll still be here.
Chris, his wife Emily, and our friend John Whitenack joined me to pre-ride the 100K this Saturday. Jane was nice enough to drive out to a few controls and make sure we had enough water and some goodies.
Thursday night I managed to hurt my knees pretty bad while riding my bike around town. I think the weeks worth of exercise just really caught up to my joints. I went to bed for a couple of nights in pain. There wasn’t a position that I could find that would make it stop. Naturally, I was pretty scared that I wouldn’t be able to ride on Saturday. In fact, once Friday night rolled around, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to.
Surprisingly the knees felt slightly better once I woke up. I really didn’t want a DNS or DNF next to my name on a ride that I helped organize. I figured I could suffer through it and just take a little time off the bike after that… yes I really am that stupid. Even more surprising was the fact that the ride seemed to get rid of the pain all together. I guess they just needed to be worked over to help the fact that I… worked them over?
Chris’ wife Emily was the trooper of the day. She didn’t have a ride longer than maybe 30 miles in her legs all year and she got through all of the hardest parts of the ride. She hitched a ride with Jane at the Dash Point control where we bought some croissants (twice baked chocolate!) from Bakery Nouveau in West Seattle for the riders. Don’t be expecting that on the actual ride though, I’m not made of money, damnit.
John clearly had fresher legs than Chris and I and cooked us on every single hill throughout the day. Between a flat tire and some general meandering/chatting, we were cutting some of the early time cutoffs close. The first portion (20 miles or so) of the ride is definitely harder than the rest of it. Once you get through that portion, you should make up plenty of time on the second half.
We are all pretty exciting to get this thing off of the ground though. I hope you can join us.
In other news, we welcomed Chibi to our family on Thursday afternoon. She was helping me build some muscle after the ride Saturday.
