Too Long Since Last Time

It has certainly been too long since our last post on the blog! We are still training and plan to post a lengthy summary of recent events and our upcoming final two weeks of training over the weekend. Depending on how the next couple of days go, we may do the Knoxville Tour de Cure (an American Diabetes Association event) on Saturday as a warm up event to our ride which is now only 23 days away!

The heat is making training tough but we are pushing through and are trying to stay hydrated and focused on the goal. Any words of encouragement are being accepted and again, we will post a longer entry this weekend!

The Show Must Go On

Three hours west of Knoxville, in Nashville, there is a local breakfast nook called The Pancake Pantry. At the Pancake Pantry, their slogan is "rain, snow or shine, there's always a line." The same goes for our training; rain, snow, cold, hot....the show must go on and we must still ride! Training is going well and we are preparing both mentally and physically for our 50 mile ride this Sunday, our longest to date.

Hopefully if we can do 50 miles on Sunday with a relatively uneventful conclusion than we will be on a good track for 105 in Sonoma next month. Our longest training ride that we will complete before the actual ride is 70 miles, per our training plan. I mention that we hope this Sunday will be "uneventful" because last Sunday was not. The meteorologists were wrong once again when they predicted a break from 10a-2p in the week long monsoon that has hit Knoxville. We started off in a light mist that soon turned into a downpour. Ten miles into this ride, I hit an uneven part of pavement and me and the Trek both went skidding across the pavement at 15mph. I think we came to a complete stop around 10 feet from where the fall began and I immediately rose to my feet relatively uninjured. My bruises and sore right shoulder are all healing well and that makes the "fall count" for Jessica and I 1-1.

Notes of Interest

• Although not yet noted on our website, we have hit $7500 in fundraising, well over our goal. My personal goal has been $10,000 for ten years of diabetes but that is likely unrealistic, however, we will keep plugging away.
• Additional pictures have been loaded onto the album in the column to the right of this entry.

Best of the Best

Now that Jessica and I have been training for this bike ride for over two months, we are to the point where we are doing long rides that are high risk and high reward. Finishing our 32 mile ride this past Sunday (Easter) felt great but was certainly met with our fair share of interesting occurrences.

Until last week (Sunday, March 5th) we had not yet had any real snafus as it relates to our training. Jessica did fall in Kingston Pike, which could have been real bad, but she was a trooper and got up, dusted her shoulders off, and kept on burning up the pavement. The snafu on 4/5 came when the backpack that I was carrying for our 25 mile ride that day suddenly drenched my back. My fears were confirmed when I stopped, opened up the bag, and found two inches of Gatorade saturating a silver, perfectly functioning Blackberry. This wasn't my first encounter with moisture and cell phones but the crazy thing was that as I stuck my hand into the puddle of lemon-lime electrolytes I realized that although dead, the blackberry was seizing, or vibrating, as it may have been. I took the battery out, dumped the Gatorade out, and kept pedaling...no time to sweat the small stuff!

This Sunday, however, we encountered "Lover's Lane," the Little River Railroad Museum, and even a snake being attacked by vultures on our scenic tour of Townsend, TN. We were also able to enjoy two swinging bridges and also encountered nice tourists from south Alabama. Ahh, the great American vacationers of the Great Smokey Mountains!

Our rides are getting longer just in time for the warmer temperatures of spring in the south. However, Jessica and I both are continuing to build up our endurance, find our cadence with our bikes, and learn what it means to stay hydrated and full of plenty of carbs during each and every outing. We're learning more about the sport of cycling everyday.

One Final Note: We are proud to announce that we have already sold 57 tickets to our Happy Hour 4 a Cure event. Today we secured Taylor Corum as our acoustic performer to start the evening and the Dirty Guv'nahs are looking forward to their first show in Knoxville since their big CD release party at the Bijou downtown last week. Buy your tickets today!