the next one

Now that nearly two months have passed since my bicycular circumnavigation of Lake Tahoe I think it's safe to say I've officially dropped the ball on my post-ride report. Several times since, I've sat down to compose this travelogue, and found myself stymied at every turn. Most often, I've known where I want to go before I sit down to write, but I couldn't quite find the way to get there. Writer’s block is a bitch.

Without risk of hyperbole, I can easily state that the Tahoe ride was one of the best things I’ve ever done. During four months of focusing on training and fundraising, it was regrettably easy to forget about the people we were raising money for. But that was not so on June Sixth. There was no escaping the hundreds of people along the road cheering us on and encouraging us with their signs of support and gratitude.

We took our sweet time; we were on the road for about eleven hours. Of course, by noon we had only spent about three hours in the saddle. One of the coaches, who had not ridden with our group all spring, urged us to pick up the pace just a bit. He was politely urged to shove it. Sure, we took longer than a lot of people but we had a lot of fun and anyway there was still a huge crowd cheering at the finish line.

The whole experience was so positive that I have applied for - and have accepted - a position as a team captain for the National Capital Chapter Area's new winter season. My responsibilities are basically that of an assistant coach: I will report on how the team's training and fundraising is going, and offer my meager assistance and advice to those who need it. In two short months, we'll begin training for the Solvang Century in the Danish part of beautiful southern California.

Don't worry, I'm not going to hit you up for a donation. (Though I won't make the same promise when I do the Tahoe ride again in next spring.) Rather, I want to let you know I don't intend to fill your mailboxes with a bunch of unsolicited email in the coming months. I am stealing a page out of Mehaffey's book and setting up a website to document my progress. It's still a somewhat threadbare offering, so I fully expect to be panned by the Washington Post Blog Cricket, but in the meantime I'll also be noodling around with learning HTML and hope to flesh it out a bit. I've posted my thoughts leading up to Tahoe for posterity's sake, and they have been enhanced with mild HTML goodness, so check 'em out. You can also now display your hate mail for all to see in the comments section. Go nuts. Pictures of Tahoe are coming soon. So without further ado:

Enjoy

Special thanks go to Dan, for providing an idea good enough to steal; Layton, for help with the HTML questions; Dave, for inspiring the URL; and Jason, of course, for egg design.