Getting ready for the ride.

This year I plan to ride across America with "America by Bicycle" on their "Fast America" ride. It starts in Costa Mesa CA and ends in Amesbury MA -- coast to coast, almost 3500 miles in 32 days.

Here is a link to their website and this ride:

http://www.americabybicycle.com/fast.shtml

Although it is unlikely that anyone other than family reads this blog, in case you are not family here is my collection of pictures:

www.wdthompson.com


I've been training on and off (more later) for the ride and decided to start this blog so that I could record my daily training experiences and then have a place to blog during the ride -- should I get that far !

We split our time between our place 200 miles north of Toronto (Loring, Ontario if you want to go to maps.google.com) and New Smyrna Beach, Florida. When we lived in Philadelphia I rode regularly on the weekends usually putting in 75-85 miles on Saturday and 50 miles on Sunday. I really enjoy the longer distance riding. Once up north for the summers, though, it was harder to get in long distance rides. The roads are rough and I have many competing projects on the go. I have always been an early morning person and found that once I had been up working at whatever for a couple of hours, it was harder to get out and go for a ride. So -- long story short -- I actually did less riding after retirement than before -- that is up until this past November.

When we came down to Florida in November to start our first winter season down here, I started riding in earnest. One of the things that I wanted to do in retirement was a ride across the country and had started planning for this upcoming ride. Even though we had many projects down here as we worked on getting our "house in order" so to speak, the upcoming ride demanded that I be in good biking shape. So -- after a week of short rides (24 miles round trip to the end of the Canaveral National Seashore and back) I started lengthening my rides -- 50 miles then 70 miles, to build up my distance endurance.

By the end of our month in Florida I was riding every day alternating between 50 and 70 miles -- the weather was warm and the riding was pleasant.

We went north for Christmas and I tried to stay in shape using the trainer, getting on it every second day, but it was not the same. The best that I could do was an hour on the trainer -- the Carmichael training videos from Aaron (son-in-law) helped, but it was still boring. Then we went skiing for a week at Whistler before coming back down to Florida, arriving here late on January 20th.

We have a lot to do down here, getting ready for the painter to arrive on the 21st, but I have to start riding ... so let's end this post and I'll try and reconstruct the rides from then until now.

I warn you though, this blog is likely boring for anyone else but me (and perhaps even for me) but I'll try and expand it with other day to day happenings in our lives.

Dave Thompson.