What a day today was! I hardly know where to begin.
I guess the biggest news from Day 1 is the annoucement of the team awards. Team Eagle took the prize for most amount earned by a team. They rocked it again with some $120,000. That’s an incredible amount of cash. It’s great they were able to do so much. The very cool news is that the Flying Goats got the award for the highest per person average of $5,500. I’m so proud of my team! Our prize? We get to escort a balloon in this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. That’s going to be incredible.
For today I was in the cabose position bringing up the rear of the ride to make sure no riders were left behind. I rode with Garrison, who was all kinds of awesome. He is one of the PosPeds, who have HIV/AIDS and is out here riding with us. We had a great time taking care of each other and taking care of the other riders at the back of the ride.
It was a varied day. For every leg we would do going 8mph behind a rider, we’d have times where we’d leave an Oasis late enough that we could crank out some decent speed. In all I rode about 93 of the 99 miles. I swept a few miles due to cabose duties as opposed to speed or physical issues.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow to see how the new training works out as I ride with Kip and Joey. Today I had some good hill stuff going on and, when I was able to open up on the flats, I was going at a good speed.
Tomorrow we go 105 miles. It’s a longer route than it was supposed to be by 5 miles due to some Irene mess still out there. I hope to be as successful as I was today.