jtalbot/swim

Yesterday was the Tour de Cure in Utah. This is a 100 mile bike ride where each rider helps raise money for the American Diabetes Association. You have to raise at least $150 to ride. Just a few weeks ago, my niece was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, so we decided to throw a family team together at the last minute. Raising money and awareness was fun, but I really wish we could have convinced more riders to join the team. As it turned out, only Charmaine joined the team to ride the 100 miles with me. My brother joined the team and raised money, but he stuck with the family fun ride (only 1 mile) so he could stay closer to his family. Mark, a friend that works with Charmaine, and his neighbor rode with us, even though they were representing a different team. It was a lot of fun.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written about riding or running. I haven’t been avoiding writing, I’ve been avoiding riding and running. It all broke down when I went to the Google I/O conference in San Francisco the first week on May. After that I was really busy getting my garden ready before I went out of town the next week. I was in Israel and Jordan for the next two weeks. All in all, it’s been about a month since I’ve done any working out, but that wasn’t going to stop me from riding the Tour de Cure.

The weather was just about perfect. It was nice and cool, slightly overcast most of the day, and not very windy. That’s somewhat unusual, as the area we were riding is known for extreme winds. I should mention, even though there wasn’t a lot of wind, we always seemed to be riding into it. I guess that’s just the way it goes.

I was surprised how well I did. My legs never really felt tired until the very end, when were really pushing towards the finish. Part of that was undoubtedly due to having Mark out front most of the race. He’s doing Lotoja this year, so I didn’t feel too badly about letting him work a little harder.

I did have some trouble with my right knee though. There was a big climb at about the 45 mile point. I stopped a few times on the way up (I think the grade was something close to 12% by the end), but was still feeling good. After coming down the other side, my right knee started to feel wrong. A few miles later it was really bothering me. I would pop my shoe off my pedal and shake my leg out every now and then, and that seemed to help, but it continued to hurt more and more until I was really having a hard time with the starting and stopping.

At lunch (somewhere around mile 80) I got some tylenol and took some time to really stretch it out. A few minutes later it was feeling great again and we rode the last 20 miles home at a good clip. It was really fun.

100.16 miles

Now I need to start running again, and it needs to be in the mornings, since I have a “real” job again.