Feeling 100!

 So a couple of months ago my buddy Don found this bike ride on May 18 (last saturday) that had a 100 mile distance.  Not one of those metric 100K things but an actual physical 100 mile ride.  I was stoked, he was stoked and Jeff ditched us (probably for the better).  This ride started with one lap around "Texas Motor Speedway" which was real cool but that was all of the cool for the day.  Now TMS is like 60 miles from my home and the race started at 7:30am so I woke up at 4:00am and was out the door by 4:30am and the picture above was me and like four other people at the track before 6:00am.  I am late to everything so I planned to get lost a couple of times and I always need time to air the tires and snack on something.

 Here is Don and I both sporting our "Red Rider" jerseys since we both are diabetics of the sugar kind.  It was nice having Don at the race, when I did the triathlon last month it was just myself so having someone else to hang out with before a race is always welcome company in my book.  The picture above was about the only happy moment we had for the seven plus hour torture session.

 You see all these folks in this picture above?  They all started with the 100 mile group and the course was so bad (really bad) that the only difference between the 100k and the 100 miles was that we did a second 35 mile loop after we started the ralley with a 30 some odd miles riding in a beautiful industrial area trying to not get hit by semi-trucks making deliveries.  So when you made it to this certain point on the course (around mile 60) for both the 100K and the 100 mile ride you took a left turn to head back to the speedway or you went straight and did your second lap of 35 miles of trains, planes, and semi-trucks.  Most of these people switched to the 100k once they did the first lap of turtue.  I am sure you are not making sense of my bad description of the course but think of TMS in the middle and we did a 30 mile circle on one side and two 30 mile loops on the other side.

 I know you all wanted to see some leg and here is my real nice I guess you could call it a farmers tan but I call it my not so sexy biking tan.

 More bad pictures of farmer/ cycling tan lines.  You know how long it is going to take me to get ride of these lines?

The final moment of victory, Don and I enjoying the only things we could get from the concierge people as they packed everything up, one cold water and one cold Diet Coke.  The race announcer told everyone at the start of the race that if you did not have your vehicle out of the speedway by 3:30pm it would be towed.  The picture above was taken at 3:15pm as we scurried to our vehicles right after this photo.

Now Don apologized to me for finding this ride but I keep telling him it is not his fault.  Heck how would we know that riding bikes along highways, industrial parks, chip and seal roads would be so bad if we hadn't done it in the first place.  That is why these are adventures, we do them to find out what they are about and hopefully live to tell the horror stories later.  Oh I almost forgot to mention the extra fun they gave us and that was when we made it to the speedway after our second loop of fun we had to do two laps around the outside of the parking lots surrounding the speedway.  Now TMS holds like 200,000 people so you are basically circling a small city twice just to finish the 100 miles.  I told Don that he has to do the Autumn in Bonham this year in October to see what a good race is like.  They don't take us on any highways and each small quaint town hosts a rest stop with all sorts of chairs, firefighters, ham radio operators, food, and fun.  They even have real SAG vehicles in Bonham.  This race had people at rest stops driving around looking for people on the course as to see when they could tear the rest stop down, not your typical SAG vehicles.  They say your first time is supposed to be memorable and this definitely was that because we lived to tell the funny stories.