When I blogged about One hundred people signing up to ride across the continent on December 8, I didn’t really imagine that in the next 2 months we’d actually make it all the way to 200 cyclists signed up for this awesome adventure!

Well, the deadline to sign up occurred this past week on Thursday at midnight I guess. And there was a bit of a flurry of registrations, God is good! I’ve got 199 cyclists to make friends with over the course of 9 weeks next summer. That doesn’t even include the mobile kitchen staff and support crew, who I can imagine will get to become some fantastic friends as well (maybe even best friends?).

The bike ride to school this morning was a tad chillier than I’ve ever experience before. In fact I think it might have been colder than any other bike ride I’ve ever done by something like 12^o Celsius! The radio this morning was reporting a wind chill of 47^o below zero (minus thirty four or something without the wind). For all you Americans reading this, that’s 53^o below zero! Chances are there will be many days next summer riding at more than 150^o Fahrenheit warmer than that!

I’ll admit it’s not so much training as it is survival when you’re riding a bike around the city when it’s that cold… but, I made a commitment to myself to ride that bike to school every day of university this year and I don’t intend on quitting that plan just yet.

About a week ago I mentioned a request for prayer regarding a permit for the Sea to Sea Bike Tour. The permit was granted this past week!

There are a collection of Sea to Sea cyclists maintaining BLOGS in addition to myself and Sunday afternoons always seem to be the time where I can survey the week’s posts by fellow riders. I ran across one today by Ryan Bruxvoort from Chicago. The Entry: Love God with your Heart, Soul, Mind, and Bike commented on the uneasiness that has been sensed by many if not all the riders regarding the expense of putting on a big bike trip and buying cycling gear etc with our money when that money could in theory be used for something else. Click on that above link to read his comments.

It got me to reflecting on the same situation… but instead of having my bike as the second most expensive possession (following a car) I’ve got two bikes as most expensive possessions #1 and #2. So am I twice as in trouble?

No, I don’t believe so, the fact that there is some uneasiness surrounding the idea is comforting. It means that there is a desire to align the life I live with my ideology. Last summer when my quiver of bikes was widened by one (ask me the story about that) I was considering what it meant for myself to put such a large fraction of my time and money into the sport. Where on the totem pole of values was cycling coming? I as aware of the fact but not drawing a ton of conclusions. Within a week a co-op student from out of town commented on how much he hated doing groceries on foot and the sore arms that result from carrying bags of groceries home from the store. I had a bike to lend out, and I caught the opportunity. If those thoughts hadn’t been milling around in my head it probably would have passed me by. My reaction could easily have been one of solidarity, complaining about the times I occasionally did groceries on foot and the dead-arms that always resulted from trying to buy way more food than I could carry. When you’ve got your mind in the right headspace there are opportunities that present themselves. It’s impossible to capitalize on them if you’re going about life with closed fists and your head down.

I’d like to ask you to hold the following logistics-related item in prayer before God in the coming days.

A permit is required for the Sea to Sea Bike Tour to book space at Liberty State Park in order to end the tour there on the water’s edge. Normally, New Jersey government officials do not issue permits there on a holiday weekend and so far we have been denied. Please pray that God will make a way where there seems to be no way, and that he will bless Ed’s and John’s efforts to either get the necessary permit, or find another suitable location. Humanly-speaking, our strong desire is to end at Liberty State Park. God’s will be done!

A friend from triathlon club was doing a purge of his pantry from bike gear he decided he no longer needed to hold on to. I would agree that his house was overflowing with bike stuff and because I can still turn around in my room and don’t yet have enough biking clothes to do the entire 64 days next summer without doing laundry, I aquired a bunch of new-used stuff. A stack of jerseys, cyclocross tyres, race tyres, some cold-weather tights, and some new wheels!

They’re Mavic Cosmic Elite wheels, aluminum alloy, medium profile with blade spokes. I intend on equipping the rear with a carbon fibre disk shell (wheelbuilder.com) and using them for racing and the occasional simulation training ride. I guess this summer isn’t going to give them a ton of use but I’ll be sure to break them out for “Tuffest Three” in October as I need to help our team defend the title.

It’s exciting when I’ve got the opportunity to talk about why I’m riding next summer with people who are far more serious cyclists than myself. There’s something about biking across an entire continent that captures the imagination of everyone. It’s atypical when the “imagination” turns to how cool it would be to put in 9 weeks of high volume bike training back to back, but in some sense it’s the same thing. It’s doing something big enough to cause some apprehension, doing it with a purpose, and being super excited about the opportunity. That’s what makes this whole bike ride into such a good place to begin a conversation. Where God allows that conversation to go is the exciting part.

My article for the Banner arrived in Church mailboxes across North America this week. Catching me a bit off guard, I was under the impression that this was coming on Feb 1. I had a bit of a fundraising blitz ready to go at the end of January and point people to read the banner the next week, a bit of a double whammy and get things into peoples heads two weeks in a row.

Obviously that plan was not to be when I wasn’t even in the country when the Banner arrived. Maybe I just need to be reminded that my skills aren’t going to raise $10000, I can’t do it alone with my best plans, best writing and best effort.

The article is fantastic and is 4 pages long in the banner, starting on this page and my article is on this page along with a sweet photo taken by Reuben Krabbe.

Many moons ago I wrestled together some javascript and css to make a nice photo gallery software package for my brother Reuben. I decided today when I sat down at my computer after the last tests and saw that he also wrote his very first blog entry with the code I wrote more than half a year ago… that I should get that good code and put it into my own set of pages, considering traffic here has approximately tripled in the past couple months. Ideally I’d like to have written some “comment” functionality into this website by the time next summer rolls around. I’m trying to figure out a good way to do it, that is portable for both weBLOG entries and photos in the gallery. The way things are indexed at the moment I’m not exactly sure how simple that is to do.

The photo galleries now navigate a bit more effectively and you can preview the next thumbnail as you’re perusing your way through an album. I made similar changes on the Sea to Sea portion of the website to improve the coherence of the look.

Today we passed the 100-cyclist mark for people registered to ride from SeatoSea next summer. It’s a good landmark but I continue to hope and pray that the number will continue to grow. I previously mentioned that 100 people would be biking next summer, that was a total including people who are only able to get enough time off work (or permission from their spouse etc.) to bike for only a portion of the ride. As things currently stand we’re bigger than the largest ever cross continental bike ride (Sea to Sea 2005) and at this rate I hope we’ll be breaking that record by a significant amount. More riders out there means more people to ride with, live with and get to know. More importantly though, it means that more money will be raised to support development work.

It’s no accident that Advent tradition is supposed to get one thinking about the coming of Christ. The word means coming, and in many ways it’s a time designed for reflection on what it really means that Christ Jesus showed up on earth. On top of that however is the reminder that we await another arrival. The first week of advent is one in preparing our hearts with an attitude of hope.

Yet, This I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him” The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

Lam 3:21-26

Being “hope week” this week, it’s been good to have the idea reinforced in my head that this isn’t about wishing, it’s about expecting. I don’t wish salvation through the arrival of a crying baby, I expect it. Similarly I don’t wish that the injustices of the world would be undone, I wait with expectations that God is bringing restoration to such situations. I don’t hope that the money raised next summer will help make a bit of difference. I have great expectations of what God can do with the bits and pieces that we can offer to him. One hundred people getting on bikes is something worth getting excited about, it’s worth having some hope that good things can happen as a result.

Google added a new feature to their maps software that I noticed for the first time today. It’s called “Terrain” and shows very roughly the topography of an area using a grayscale overlay on the green-brown-sand-snow kind of color schemes. I think it’s really quite something and even though the satellite view is really the more important one in most situations there are reasons in which this map style teaches you something that the satellite map cannot. Namely how the mountain ranges link together. Where the mountains “end” etc. I of course looked first at what kind of terrain we were going to be tackling on the bike ride next summer.

The first 4 or so days of the ride are going to be tough ones. Tougher than I realized. I remembered Washington State in two pieces from the time I visited. #1, the peninsula and the beach, and then the big desert along the river. I was a bit surprised as well as excited that we get some serious mountains right off the start. I also found out that the week between Boise and Salt Lake City doesn’t actually have any passes, it’s probably net uphill but there’s no King of the Mtns Jersey to be won there. I had the impression that it would be a tough week but the route actually skirts the bottom of the Mtn Range near Boise. The satellite map shows a big irrigation district but I figured it was in the midst of some serious hills. I shouldn’t say that it won’t be bad because you never know about wind, bad weather or crappy roads, but it’s not terribly hilly from what I can tell.

The Going to the Sun Loop in Glacier National Park was one of the things I decided to look at as I remembered the satellite imagery to be a bit ambiguous last time I looked. I’ve only seen one side of it and since I’ve heard good things about doing the loop in a day (136 miles) I wanted to see what the other side was like. It’s much more easily understood with the terrain option and quite obvious which side of the mountains you’re on.