It's about to get real!

That's right, I'm on my way to Leadville!

[ And I have to take this opportunity to remind you that you can still donate to my Team First Descents effort to help young cancer survivors! ]

My apologies for not blogging more, but honestly my training got pretty boring after those first few big milestones.  Since I've last posted I have a good many more rides longer than four hours, with many at the six hour length.  This calendar year alone I've now done almost two thousand miles of bicycling and well over 300 miles of running.  That's alongside something like 75 hours of weight room training.  I'm certainly in the best shape of my life.

Will it be enough for the Leadville Trail 100 MTB race?  It should be.  But just in case it's not, I'm leaving pretty early so I can do the Carmichael Training camp specifically geared for this race.  Then I'm going to stay in Leadville for the three weeks in between to finish my training at altitude so that I'm as acclimated as I can get.  Next I'm going to take the start line and do my best to enjoy my day and hope that everything works out well for me.  If it does, I'll be back to the finish in something under twelve hours and join the list of Leadville finishers.  As long as it's under twelve hours, I'll consider this a raging success.  Can I get it a lot under 12 hours?  Stay tuned...

I'm writing this entry while my buddy, John, takes a turn driving us out.  He's an awesome road trip buddy who agreed to drive out with me to give me some company and help with the driving load.  I'll drop him off in Denver to fly back to NC here soon, though.  Then my buddy Alan will fly in and join me this weekend for the camp and fly back home shortly after.  Then next week another buddy, Matt, will fly in and stay for three weeks with me.  He'll be the crew for Alan and I during the race, and otherwise he and I will do some motorcycle riding around Colorado when I'm not training.

The best part is one of Matt's kids will fly with my wife and my two kids to Leadville just before the race and they will help crew, too.  Then we'll all stick around Colorado for another week after and do some sight-seeing.  We're going to have a ton of fun!  Well, they will.  I'll probably sit in the car for a few days whimpering and licking my wounds!

The worst part is being gone this long from my wife and kids.  Hopefully I can keep myself occupied well enough to not miss them too badly.  We had a long talk and the kids promised to help out really well while I'm gone, and I'm sure they will.  Otherwise Ashley is at the ready to ship ME their iPod's and the Wii remotes. *cough*

Anyway, here's a picture of the RV and trailer as we loaded up to head this way...

I'll be staying for the next month in that RV, too!  One of us may not survive...

And here's the bike rack we built on the wall:

We've got two motorcycles loaded behind those, and every bicycle part and tool that I own, I think.  And at least I'm going out early enough that I should be able to figure out everything I've forgotten in plenty of time to get it here anyway!

I'll try to write about how the camp goes, and then look for some blog posts with some pictures from some very high mountain passes (that I'll be finding via motorcycle, not bicycle!) over the next few weeks....