Ok folks, things are getting real as I round the corner to 8 weeks. It is June 22nd today and we are one day past the summer solstice. Aug 22nd is our start date in Astoria, OR for our “cannonball” cross country. A weathered motorcyclist clad in leather, with deep set wrinkles and a sick Harley at the Sauk City KwikTrip shared the term “cannonball”. Me and Dan, my ride buddy, stopped on a training ride there. All sorts of people will strike up a conversation outside KwikTrip and ask about what you’re up to as you gobble down a rice crispy treat and a bog of potato chips. A “Cannonball” is what the motorcycle community calls a cross country. I know it as a big splash of a jump off a dock worthy of the warning call, “CANNONBALL!!”. I was immediately brought back to the 70’s Burt Reynold’s movie “Cannonball Run”. Burt Reynolds, Dom Del’oise, Sally Field. Back when Clint Eastwood made movies with oragnatanges. I guess that’s what we’re doing, Dan and I. CANNONBALL!!! Here we go, watch out! I met Dan at a ride camp in Fredricksburg, Texas this February and we are now a sounding board for each other’s anxieties and fears related to this challenge and also the gains as we train day after day. In Astoria we’ll dip our back wheel in the Pacific and Fast-Forward, or slow-forward, as we creep across the land of the free and home of the brave to the Atlantic Ocean in Portland, Maine. There we’ll dip our front wheel in the Atlantic ocean. It’s hard for me to conceptualize the miles, the climbs and the hours ahead of me on the bike. I am certain it will be boring, monotonous and spectacular at the same time. I am 54 and ten years out from a cancer diagnosis and I question my capacity to take this on. This Cannonball that has the most conditioned and experienced riders I’ll ever get to know pause at the enormity of it. I can only trust the process that my coach, Tom at VQ, has my back and has in fact prepared me physically over the past 14+ months. The mental game is another matter entirely. The hard thing day after day, the discomfort, the ability to stop and probably really wanting to.
So this is my call out for help to get me through this. I didn’t make it through cancer by myself and I need help from my community to get me through this. Do you want to follow me? I’ll be posting every day on the rise and you can “be with me” on the route you choose. I hae a link to Hear abut what this is like, what I saw, who I rode with, how I occupy my mind over these many days. I am linking my Spotify playlists. One is specifically for South Dakota.