Journeys: MS Bike Ride 2005 - Cache Valley, Utah - Biking

Sunday, June 26, 2005

MS Bike Ride 2005 - Cache Valley, Utah - Biking

This weekend was the MS150 bike tour up in Logan, UT. It's a big bike ride/fundraising event for the Utah chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society. This year there were over 2300 bikers and they raised 1 million dollars - definitely a great event to be a part of. I rode with Team Albertsons again this year because I have a few friends that ride with them.

Saturday was my second official 100-mile century ride. I finished in 6 hours which was pretty good considering whoever made the course saved all the hills for the end .. and decided to make it about 106 miles. The wind was pretty strong all day and that slowed me up, but the last 5 miles I had to bike in a thunderstorm microburst that was knocking riders off their bikes and blowing tree branches into the road. It was wild. Those last 5 miles took forever! I rode the remaining 45 miles today with much nicer weather.

Special thanks to my dearest friend Felipe for transporting me and my bike to Logan ... and for making Logan as fabulous as possible while I wasn't biking.

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards"

-- Edward Abbey

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. "

-- John Muir

"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."

-- Terry Tempest Williams

"There may be people who feel no need for nature. They are fortunate, perhaps. But for those of us who feel otherwise, who feel something is missing unless we can hike across land disturbed only by our footsteps or see creatures roaming freely as they have always done, we are sure there should be wilderness. Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis for our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?"

-- Margaret E. Murie

"I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?"

-- Everett Ruess