6 posts tagged “cycling”
Break open the champagne!
The time has come to award the yellow jersey.
Our hero has returned! Yes, it's true! John Dempsey is now home
with Cristy. As the story goes, John and Joe left the state of Washington
three weeks ago on September 4th. After twenty-two days of nothing
but tailwinds and downhill backroads from the Great Northwest to the
Great Midwest, our biker-hero, now the victor has returned safely home. (Of
course, we'll all hear John's detailed stories of torrential
rainstorms, violent headwinds, frigid cold, endless mountain climbs, numbing
hands, saddle sores, and lackluster low-nutrition food. And we will
love hearing every detail of our hero's journey, except the part about
the saddle sores.)
. . . And I think I do something when I ride 30 miles. . . Our hats are off to you Hero John !
Hi
we have a friend, yes, I know that's sometimes difficult to believe, and he is riding from Seatlle Wa home, starting today. Wow.
Here is a link to a story that the Rockford Register Star ran this morning. . .
Cyclists Journey, Because They Can . . .
http://www.rrstar.com/sports/x2136190474/index.html?printview=true
Here's the text too. . .
Cyclist journey because they can
Sep 04, 2007 @ 12:04 AM
By Mike DeDoncker
Sometime this afternoon, longtime riding partners John Dempsey and Joe McDonough are going to meet up at a bicycle shop in Anacortes, Wash., jump on their bikes and see how long it takes to ride back to Rockford.
No competition. No pressure of any kind, really. They’re just doing it because they’re pretty sure they can.
“It’s just something that kind of came up,” said McDonough, a Rockford native who moved to Middleton, Wis., four years ago. “Cycling is what we’ve done the most of, and I’ve always wanted to do something like this. This just happened to be when we could both get the time to go.”
Dempsey, a Rockford firefighter, said the two will begin their trip mere hours after arriving at Seattle’s Sea-Tac International Airport because their first full day of riding will include a 75-mile stretch through a pass in the Cascade Mountains from Marblemount to Mazama, Wash., where there are very few services.
“We want to get there in the morning and not have to worry about being in that stretch at night,” said Dempsey, adding that they want to average about 150 miles a day.
“I know that may be biting off a lot, but we’ll have nothing to do all except ride. There might be some 200-mile days. There might be some 100-mile days and, if there are, we’ll probably enjoy the break.”
Because they hope to make the approximately 2,400-mile trip in 19 days, unless they take a possible detour from Glacier National Park into Canada that would add an additional 200 miles, Dempsey said they will be traveling light.
“I did this type of ride from Rockford to the East Coast in a couple of stages about two or three years ago with some other friends,” Dempsey said, “so this kind of completes a trip across the country for me, but I’m sure Joe is going to want to talk me into doing that half again, but with him next time.”
McDonough put off any future long-distance plans, saying this is the longest ride he will have attempted.
“I’ve had some long days, but I’ve never strung essentially two-thirds of the country together into one day after another,” he said.
McDonough said he wants the chance to see the country from a different perspective, and enjoy spending time in states he has never visited, particularly Washington and Montana, and “to see how many days in a row you can get up and do the same thing and still stay in decent shape.”
Dempsey said he hasn’t done any special training for the trek because “you can ask anybody, I ride with everyone in town.
“I ride with a morning group, an evening group and a weekend group. I’m not one who logs miles or times on the bike, but I’ve probably done 6,000 miles on my bike already.”
The Tour de France started on Saturday. The three best weeks of the summer- our 4th of July, and, the tour. 2200 miles of people riding across the country, doing more in one day than most people do in a year.
This is the video that keeps us inspired for cycling. .
wow, what a wonderful week so far. Perfect weather. At least I think so, but most of our readers and writers would disagree. How can one not ride to work, when it's like this? Even a few of my badass co-workers rode today. I guess if there isn't a cupholder for the latte on their bikes, they can't ride to work in the morning.
Oh yeah, my bike is the blue one in the middle. . .
I plan to ride more than them this year. . .
How 'bout you?
