2023 Cross Country Update
On January 1 of this year, I posted that I planned on biking cross-country with my friends Jesse and Ruth, bicycling from Portland Oregon to Portland Maine with Trek Travel starting this month. Unfortunately, as I will describe below, I have had to change my plans. While Jesse and Ruth will be starting to bicycle cross-country tomorrow, I will not be joining them until Madison WI, doing only the last third of the trip.
Last month, my dad passed away from lung cancer. As his conditioned deteriorated, my bicycling plans had to be put on hold while I supported him and my mom. This past week, I helped my mom move into an assisted living unit which can provide her with additional supports now that Dad is no longer here to help her. After 62 years of marriage, this has been an incredibly difficult time for Mom. Slowly, Mom is developing a new rhythm to life without Dad. As this happens, I am able to gradually spend more time on leisure activities like biking. Supporting my parents has been more than a full time job over the past number of months.
Training for the cross-country trip was going well through the beginning of May. During the next week or so, I will post about a wonderful few days biking in the Finger Lake region in early May with my regular riding buddies Jesse, Ruth, and Doug. Around that time, as Dad's health declined and the trip payment became due, I made the decision to not to ride this summer. With no clear picture about Dad's health trajectory and both Mom and Dad needing lots of support, committing to the trip simply did not seem realistic.
Following Dad's passing, I reached out to Trek to see if I could join for the Madison to Portland portion. This would allow time for me to provide lots of help to Mom and work towards getting into shape to ride day after day. Because I had biked the 2019 cross country trip, I know the daily rhythm of the trip, so I will be able to join in relatively seamlessly. Likely, because of this, the circumstances of having to cancel, and the good fortune of being able to get an additional room for each of the hotels on route at that late date, Trek gave me the go ahead to join in Madison. This is completely out of their normal operations, and I am very grateful to them for making this exception for me.
From mid-May through the end of July, I was only been able to get sporadic rides of short to moderate distance. The last couple of weeks, I have been able to ramp up my biking somewhat, but will need to continue to do so over the next month so that I will be sufficiently fit to complete the Madison to Portland portion of this trip. I will not be able to keep up with Jesse and Ruth, since they are in peak fitness. In preparation for this trip, they have ridden well over 8000 miles this year with about 25 days of 100 miles or more. After the first 30 days of riding, they will be even fitter. I am hoping they will not notice if I attach a bungy cord to their bikes to tow me along.
The Madison to Portland portion will be about 1305 miles of riding over 15 days with one rest day after the first 10 days of riding. That is about 87 miles a day. I will be departing on September 18 with the first day of riding occurring on the 20th. I hope to be posting daily blogs as I did in 2019, so stay tuned.
Finally, since I was not able to do the full cross-country this year, I have signed up for 2024. Hopefully, life events will allow me to do the entire trip next year.