Woke up this morning at 4am feeling pretty good. While a bit tired, I think the adrenaline is what really woke me up since this is the first morning in a tent. The mattress pad I bought did the trick. It lost a little bit of air overnight, but the valve was right next to my head and I was able to easily air it back up without even getting up! #lazy
I’m realizing now I haven’t actually done a good job packing my bag. As someone that prides himself in organization, it was not near as organized as I thought. My gear bag as become a swimming pool of clothes in ziplock bags, which is fine and I followed instructions. What I did NOT do a good job of was putting together the other things I would need each morning. Toothbrush, suntan lotion, GoPro batteries, etc. – which means I will spend too much time trying to get this stuff together. As my tent mate Munoz would say, I have a difficult time ‘getting my life together’…
Made it to breakfast on time, and boy are the food options good. There is so much there; if you can’t find something to eat you’re doing it wrong. The entire time I’m thinking to myself, I hope I didn’t get a ticket yesterday. You see, I also pride myself as one that follows the rules – especially when it comes to safety. On Day 1, I didn’t realize I was breaking a big rule – which is to look over your shoulder for traffic before passing another cyclist. For those of you that don’t know, I’m extremely auditory. I hear the strangest things at long distances (yes I know, half the time I don’t hear what you’re saying when you’re sitting right in front of me, but just go with me here). So what that means for me when I ride: I can always tell when a car is coming. I hear the tires/engine and what-not, so often times on Day 1, I used my ears instead of my eyes. A few of my friends called me out on this just as I made a dangerous passing without looking AND one of the event cars was the car that could have hit me if they weren’t paying attention. Now I am convinced that I’m going to get a ticket.
When you get at ticket, they pull your bike from bike parking and hold it in what everyone calls “bike jail”. You have to go and talk to them, find out what you did wrong, then they will give you your bike back. If you break the same rule another day, your bike is pulled for the whole day (you can’t ride). If you break that rule again then you’re done for the week. I certainly didn’t want to start off that way, so as you can imagine, my mind was in another place all through breakfast.
Lucky for me, I got to bike parking and I didn’t have a ticket – but the bike next to me got pulled. It’s all done by number, so technically they got it right – however, what’s ironic is that they pulled my friend that told me I was breaking the rules. Sorry, Daniel *shrug emoji goes here*.
As soon as we got ready to roll out, and I tapped my booty on the seat, I realized how tender I was and thought ‘oh boy, that’s sore’. I don’t think I’ve ever been that sore. I found a way to adjust and get comfortable and rolled out for the 109 mi ride day. While I didn’t do horrible, I certainly wasn’t pumped about how the day went. I’m still not figuring out how to stay ahead of the day and not be too far back. Almost every rest stop I get to, I only have 30-40 min to snack, use the bathroom, rest, and get moving again. Don’t get it twisted, I’m doing better than a lot of folks but just not as well as I would have liked.
This was the day of the Otter Pop Stop, which is an un-official rest stop. I was so sad that I only got to spend about 20-30 minutes here, because it was one of the ‘party’ stops where there is music, people dancing, and they hand out those little frozen ice popsicles you cut open with scissors. This is one of my first performance regrets of the week. Everyone is having so much fun, and started the fun before I did.
I finished the day, and again felt accomplished. Now I’m thinking it’s time to rinse and repeat: set up tent, shower, and eat dinner. However, my tent mate made it to camp faster than me, and he texted me when I was about 30 minutes from camp to tell me he already set up the tent for us. Talk about an awesome dude! The rest of the evening becomes fuzzy. I’m exhausted mentally and physically. I notice that everyone else seems to be in good spirits. I’m not in bad spirits, but I just don’t know where everyone is getting their energy from. I trained well for this ride and this was a long day, but I’m figuring out I’m not doing something quite right.