Halfway there...

This past weekend our training hit the halfway mark and we rode a little over 50 miles through Danville, Dublin, Livermore and San Ramon. If you want to check out the route follow this link.

I've got a little wristwatch-sized GPS that I wear when I ride and with this gadget I can upload my routes to the Allsport GPS website where they can be viewed by anyone I send a link to. The really nifty thing is if you've got Google Earth on your computer you can actually watch the route from start to finish.

Here's our buddy ride route from March 17th and our training ride out at Point Reyes from March 10th.

Just those three weekend rides amount to around 140 miles of riding. On the buddy ride on March 17th the elevation gain for the ride was over 3800 feet. That's climbing folks. Serious climbing.

I plan to post my routes here for those of you watching in the wings to look over and hopefully be inspired, or at least impressed, by. I won't be posting the routes I ride during the middle of the week (yes, that's right, I do more riding on Sunday and during the middle of the week too) mostly because they're nowhere near as interesting or impressive. The idea here isn't just to catalog what I'm doing and share it with you, it's to motivate those of you who haven't contributed yet to go ahead and do it.

The point of this whole exercise is to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I'm doing pretty good on that front. I've raised a little over half my goal for this event. But I'm not going to let up. Not one bit.

Company Guy

One of the things that still has me energized about participating in Team In Training is our Honorees. For those of you who don't know how TNT works, each team rides on behalf what are called Patient Honorees - people who are living with blood cancers who may directly benefit from the research that's funded by your donations to each of us riders. At the spring season TNT kick-off rally in February one of the speakers was a gentleman named Roman who is living with CML. His speech really fired me up, and gave me a personal reason to be proud because he talked about how much a product called Gleevec that my employers, Novartis, manufacture has helped him.

The Monday after the rally I wrote in to our employee communications mailbox about my experience and how great it was to hear a positive story about how one of our products was really helping someone. I guess the folks I work for liked what I wrote because I was featured in one of our internal newsletters that just came out today. You can have a look at the article here.

3 weeks in...

This is a big deal. I'm going to ride my bike 100 miles in a single day. I'm going to be doing over 4000 feet of climbing on that day.

My butt is going to hurt.

Look, in all seriousness, what I'm doing is going to be tough, but that's the whole idea. The whole concept behind team in training is to get folks like me off the sofa participating in some very challenging endurance sport because the folks we're trying to help have had to endure even bigger challenges. You get the point.

Last weekend we had our second official training ride out in Pinole. We rode over the infamous Three Bears route. The total mileage was about 24 miles, but the climbing - woof! We did over 2200 feet of climbing, which is about 1/2 of the total climbing on the Tahoe Century we'll be riding. That's half the total climb over 1/4 the distance. Again I say woof.

I'm a rotten climber. Really epically bad at it. My engine just was not made to ascend hills on a bike. Either that or I've just got a lot to learn about doing it properly. I sort of hope it's the latter and that I can get better at this, otherwise I'm going to be hating it big time in June when we get to Tahoe.

I'm a great descender though. I zipped down those descents last Saturday nearly reaching 40 mph, and I didn't feel unstable or like I was pushing it one bit. Maybe I can hire someone to carry me and my bike up hill and I'll just do the descents. Nah.

This weekend is our first buddy ride. Once again it's in my backyard on turf I've ridden before. We'll be doing Calaveras. That's another big mess of climbing, but at least this time it's a climb I've done before. We shall see.