So it begins

June 2, 2005 at 10:53 pm · Filed under Biking Across Kansas

We leave for the Colorado border tomorrow at 9am, so I’m going to find out real quick if my training has been enough! I think I’m probably about as ready as I could be, given the amount of time I’ve had to prepare (and working 40hrs a week).

I won’t have any Internet access during the trip, so I won’t be able to post about it until I get back. In fact, I won’t have any electronics other than my watch and my dad’s cell phone (bleh) with me. Huzzah for a week without being immersed in technology every second!

If you want to, the BAK website has a form that you can use to send me a message during the trip. Apparently there will be someone with a laptop that downloads all the messages and prints them out every day for a sort of “email call.” Anywho, it’d be cool to get notes of encouragement/ridicule/whatever from y’all. :-)

Be seeing you!

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Training, Wind, and Animals

May 31, 2005 at 9:49 pm · Filed under Biking Across Kansas

Yesterday we went on a 24 mile trip down to and through the Jim P. Martinez Sunflower Trail. If you’re curious as to what the trail is like, I found a map. There was a pretty strong headwind on the way back, so it was difficult, but good training. It’s looking more and more like the winds during the actual trip will not always be in our favor, but at least now we know we can survive that sort of thing.

Today we did a fairly light ride through The Highlands, a local Country Club and Golf area. This trip was especially fun because there were more than the usual amount of animals out and about. We saw several flocks of turkeys, numerous jackrabbits, and even a couple of cats. But the real highlight of the trip was when two deer walked across the road, right in front of us. We’ve seen deer before while biking in The Highlands, but this time they were close enough I almost had to swerve to avoid hitting the second one, which waited until the last second to decide that it really did want to follow its companion across the road after all. The wildlife in this area is really great, we don’t even have to go on a bike ride to see it either. Deer and turkeys show up in our yard all the time.

Also, the sandwich mentioned in my previous post has officially been dubbed the “Fjordwich” by MrPilot.

Friday gets closer and closer…

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Training continues

May 28, 2005 at 2:57 pm · Filed under Biking Across Kansas

My dad and I went on a pretty good bike trip to Sterling and back this morning. Ended up being a total of 41.00 miles. Yes, exactly 41. When we got to the driveway, the bike computer said we’d gone 40.74 miles. Well, I couldn’t leave it at that, so I went down to my neighbors driveway, but hit 41.00 before I got all the way to my driveway, so I stopped in the middle of the road and walked the bike the rest of the way back. :-)

We’ve definitely been improving. Both of us felt pretty good after the trip and probably could have gone further. The Biking Across Kansas website says, “you should be able to do 30 miles in 3 hours or less.” We went the first 30 miles in 2 hours and 26 minutes, so we should be pretty set for the real thing.

After taking a shower, it was time for lunch, and I was really hungry. I decided to take everything I could find in the fridge that could possibly go on sandwich and see what I could come up with. The result was highly delicious, and I recommend you give it a try. Here’s the ingredients, roughly in order of stacking:

1. Slice of toasted and buttered bread
2. Oven roasted turkey breast
3. Lettuce
4. Ranch dressing
5. Cucumber slices
6. Banana peppers
7. Smoked turkey breast
8. Mozzarella cheese
9. Jalapenos
10. Another slice of bread
11. Fajita meat
12. Onions
13. Salsa
14. Olives
15. Cheddar cheese
16. More cucumber slices
17. Thinly sliced apple pieces
18. Dill pickles
19. Tomato slices
20. Slice of toasted bread

Serve with the rest of the apple that you cut up and some baby carrots, for a really great lunch!

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Biking Across Kansas

May 27, 2005 at 5:59 pm · Filed under Biking Across Kansas

For those of you that don’t know, my dad and I have decided to go on the anual Biking Across Kansas tour. It’s an eight day, 539 mile trip across the entire state of Kansas done entirely by bicycle. This year, they decided to make the trip diagonal, which means it will be just about as long as it possibly can be. The idea is that the winds will be blowing in the right direction to make things easier, but these last few days the winds haven’t been blowing in that direction, so I guess we’ll see what happens.

Neither my dad nor I are really “bikers,” so we have a lot of training to do before we’ll be ready for the trip. We’ve been biking almost every day since I’ve been back from LeTourneau, and have seen definite improvements. The longest I’ve gone so far was a 22.5 mile trip last Saturday, which is pretty good, but on the trip every day will be 60 to 85 miles! June 4 is getting closer every day, hopefully we’ll be ready by then.

The two bikes we’ll be using on the trip are a green Schwinn and a silver Linear Recumbant. If you haven’t ridden a recumbant bike before, they’re pretty neat. You sit down and the pedals are in front of you instead of under you. My dad’s even has the handlebars for stearing underneath the seat. The plan is to trade off bikes every 10 miles or so, when the BAK people have a “SAG” stop set up.

I plan to keep a journal during the trip, which I will post here when I get back (assuming I survive the trip). If I can snag a digital camera from somewhere I might take it along and put some pictures up in my photo gallery too.

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