Day 4: Ft. Worth to Sherman

June 15, 2005

Today was the big century ride (100+ miles in one day). But as the travel leader and the as the person in charge of the city for the day I knew that the chances were very high that someone could get lost in all of the city traffic. So I asked to be one of the drivers for the day. Mallory volunteered to be the other driver.

The night's rest went well. Since I had called the walk-in closet I was able to get a little alone time, even if it was while I was sleeping. I didn't get to bed, though, until 11 or 12 trying to get everything ready since we were going to need to get up early. I was so tired that I went to bed in one position and woke up five hours later in the exact same position. I'm more than a little surprised that I was able to pop up out of bed with just five hours of sleep. I packed all my stuff up and started making eggs and bacon for everybody. Took a lot longer than I wanted to and I burnt some of the bacon by trying to do too many things at once, but it went off fairly well with the food critics in the end. A lot of people just grabbed some cereal anyway after all of the effort.

In the meantime, Mallory spent a lot of time making large posters of the directions so the riders could easily copy where to go. That process took much longer than we would have liked as well. But with 14 directions with streets going through the middle of downtown Ft. Worth it was important that I nailed down exactly which way to go. We ended up packing up everything and heading out a little bit after 7. We were aiming for 6:30, but all the details kill the time.

For the first twenty miles I would go ahead in the car, jump out at one of the important intersections (or close to it and run) and then wave the riders onto the right fork of the road. This worked very well and I could tell that the riders appreciated it. In fact, although I had been so worried about the morning since it was the worst in terms of complications, all of the extra work had paid off and things were running very smoothly. The first twenty miles just flew by. And so did the next 20. Mallory setup her lunch stop at the 55 mile marker and that's when things started going downhill.

The turnoff was supposed to be somewhere along that stretch of road, but somehow we both missed it. There was a lot of construction along the road and I honestly believe that they may have closed that part of the road and taken down the signs. Since all of the riders missed it as well while biking and looking vigilantly for it, I'm feeling pretty confident that it wasn't something that we flaked out on.

At any rate, the riders came in, but were starting to show some fatigue. The sun had started coming out, there had been some flat tires on the rough roads, and there had been a collision between Nick and Brian so some people were a little beat up. No shade at the stop didn't help much either, but really there were not better places that I saw that could have been better.

A short side story: at the lunch stop we pulled onto a median between the frontage road and the highway. There was a little gravel road that fit our vehicles and left plenty of room for the bikes. Just when the first riders came in I heard this honking coming from the other side of the cars. I look back and there is a white sedan pulling out of a driveway and trying to cross to the highway through the median. There was plenty of room on the side so I figured she was trying to do something else, but she just kept laying on the horn. Finally she pulled up closer and told us we needed to get out of her way. Which was ridiculous since you could pull a semi-truck through there was so much space. Mario told her that it was a public area and that we didn't need to move and that she could pull around us quite easily. She told us that it was not a public road, but that it was her driveway and that she was going to call the police if we didn't move. I guess you'd have to have been there, but it was pretty clear this lady was definitely acting contrary to what society would normally accept as reasonable. It very clearly was not her driveway, but we appeased her anyways since our whole goal is to spread hope and charity and not malice. Interestingly at the exact same time that she pulled by another car drove up. A man jumped out and said he was from the Oklahoma City triathlete club and that he saw the bikes and he wanted to know what was going on. When he heard about what we were doing he got very excited and his enthusiasm was pretty infectious. He stayed and chatted for a little bit and then offered to help us in any way that he could when got closer to his town. Just kind of interesting the Yin-Yang styled experiences within a heartbeat of each other.

So after lunch everybody headed out again looking for the turnoff that we were sure was just down the road. As I drove down I came across a junction that I knew was way past what we had been looking for. In fact, almost 12 miles too far. It was too much to turn around and go back so we had to improvise the rest of the way into town. And it was a mess. In short I drove almost 200 miles for a 100 mile ride as I tried to track everyone down and get them directions. I spent a lot of time going back and forth and Mallory was terrific as a driving partner, especially since she was being so patient. After a few hours we finally got everybody in with only one person having to backtrack. Although people were definitely worn out and I was worried about a few people's health everybody made it in alive.

We met up with Jerry at the Grand Avenue Presbyterian chapel and he got us all situated with the rooms. I called the space behind the puppet theater stage. We went over to the showers, but it was more like a dripping since there was no water pressure. Didn't use soap because I was concerned that the dripping water wouldn't be enough to get it off of me. But it felt good anyway. Went over to dinner and grabbed at least one of everything in the cafeteria. I've already mentioned how much I've been eating, but it was kind of funny seeing it all in front of me. We laughed about how before this trip we would never have believed that all the food on our plate was for one person. But within fifteen minutes it was all gone. I chased it down with some ice cream and was feeling pretty content.

The presentation tonight was with the Us Too! Prostate support group in Austin College, the oldest chartered college in Texas. Although there were only a few people, I felt that I learned a tremendous amount from them as they shared their personal experiences with cancer. So much technical and life information that it was almost overwhelming. I very sincerely enjoyed sharing time with them. One of the gentleman said that it was important to determine the best way to treat your particular form of cancer the first time through since cancer is always more aggressive the second time around. In fact, he compared it to playing Russian Roulette. Maybe a particular treatment has an 80% success rate, seem pretty good to me. But then that's like taking a pistol with five bullet slots, and putting in one bullet. Spin the wheel, put it up to your head and pull the trigger. Chances are high that you'll live, but that's not going to make you feel too much better as you pull the trigger. I thought that was a profound thought.

I'm off to bed now. We are going to bike across the Texas border tomorrow (already!) and I want to be fresh. Be sure to write whenever possible.