Larry and I embark on our first RAGBRAI, new to us scenery, new challenge, and we continue to ride on.

So the day before the Mount Evans HC, Deb and I drove to Idaho Springs to pick up my packet stuff and the flash flooding was definitely a damper on the mood, so much so that I was 85% sure I wasn’t going to even come to the start. As the evening progressed, I did notice a 5 hour weather window in the forecast from 5am-10am before scattered thunderstorms were even likely and my gut feeling was that 14er weather is so unpredictable, that even with the nastiness of the forecast, a sunny 60F day could spring up out of the clouds...or disaster would occur and I’d merely turn around from wherever I was and come back down to the moderate safety of the trees as quickly as the roads were hopefully dry. Emboldened by this weather window and feeling trained for this next ‘training’ ride, I went to bed at a reasonable 10pm, only to feel anxious and reluctantly watching the men’s road race taking place in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics halfway around the world just when the racing was getting racey. Thankfully I had to wake up at 4am, resulting in probably somewhere around 2.5hrs of sleep before climbing a 14er.

Back for more suffering, Mike invited Debra and me along for a family century ride, 100 miles.  I'm not anything of a road cyclist, but was interested in expanding my fitness base to meet this challenge.