So I get up today, and like most days I go to work I decide for the best option to get there: my faithful bike.

I have learned to not just take what the weather network tells me as gospel truth for how warm or cold it is, and I have also learned just poking my head out the door isn’t enough, I need to go stand outside for about 30 seconds to a minute. This is long enough for me to adjust from inside temperature to actually feeling what it is like outside.

Today, I step outside. The car is covered in frost and I can see my breath (I think it was 0 or -1 outside), so the intelligent decision is instantly made to wear long pants (everybody everybody, long pants long pants!), a long sleeve undershirt + a long sleeve shirt, and my wind gloves.

You might be saying to yourself “that seems sensible, where is the problem?”

Sandals, with no socks. This is how I always commute in the summer, and I practically live in them when there is no snow on the ground so I didn’t even think twice about it.

About 3/4 of the way to work (so, 10 of my 13 km?) my toes start to hurt. They were cool from the start, but it was like they decided at 10km they had had enough, they wanted to go home.

Fortunately, the pain was temporary (until I got to work and they started to warm up again) and I didn’t lose any toes… but again I have to ask what was I thinking?

oh, and this is just great.

ps. working on hike video, it is being a pain in my left cheek. I’ll let you decide which one

Farewell old friends, I’ll miss our daily time together.

I had a lot of good times with you, but it is time to move on to bigger and better things. Don’t think of it as your fault, but we knew this day was coming sooner or later.
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It is now just past 5 months after I made the statement of my goal for 2007, and I find myself barely 1/3 of the distance I wanted to cover this year.

5 months already? where did the summer go?

It doesn’t seem like it was all that long ago I was wishing I could stop wearing long underwear under my biking clothes to hold off the morning chill, and today I found myself wondering why I didn’t at least put a long sleeve shirt on because the air was really cool (I won’t go as far to say it was cold, but after the July we had 10 degrees in the morning is cool).
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14 days until 24 hours of adrenalin.

14 days to make that final push of conditioning to try and make sure I don’t die up there.

I went and rode through the majority of the course from last year (12 of the 14 km), and this is going to be a challenge….
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Today was my 20th ride of the year… not all that fantastic considering I started riding over 2 months ago (in fact, it is getting awfully close to 3), but comparing to last year I am way ahead of the game.

So far I haven’t been able to break the 3 rides in a week barrier, but it hasn’t been for lack of trying.
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