ahhh ok ok ok fine posting

for some reason i feel crazy guilty when i don't post. idk why. anyway.

today was like, pure awesomeness in bike form. got up at five, got all of my stuff together, helped pack the trailer, rapidly unpacked the trailer/dumped my bin on the pavement and grabbed replacement spokes for sam and then repacked it all, pumped tires, cue sheet meeting, wrote encouragement notes (think secret valentine notes except they say to and from and why this person is awesome), etc morning routine, and then set off. because today was a very important day...it was world cup finals! except, drumroll, we had an 80 mile ride to get done first, and there's always stuff to get done at the host site, and then you have to go find a TV, and the game was at 1:30 (central time yeaaaa new time zones).

so i got out of the parking lot and was totally hammering for a bit, but then i got a flat five miles in when the sidewall of my gatorskin blew out...fortunately it was a pretty small hole (but the snake bite in my tube was too big to patch) so i kept the tire and shoutout to kaitlin and cameron and ben for staying with me in the HUGE swarm of centipedes around the guardrail where i was fixing it...for some reasons creepy amounts of centipedes convene at 7 am next to cornfields in iowa...guess there's not much else to do there/then...

oh right so then i set off again, seriously having an awesome ride, and pounded out maybe 18 or 19 mph until lunch to catch up with everyone who passed us during the tire fixing and when i stopped to use the washroom at a gas station and wash off my mustache (it was our leader gabe's birthday and he has a mustache so we all drew on mustaches, except mine was sweating all over my face and i could not keep it on any longer). so i had lunch at 9 am, and set off on TERRIBLE backcountry roads that had previously had a ton of holes, so instead of fixing the holes, someone scraped up the road surface in a way that was pretty much the same as 'grooming' snow, where you put a ton of grooves into it, and making it really stressful and frustrating to ride on. but then i caught up with noam and the anthonys in the lead and we pounded it out (eventually with a few more riders) to the end of the day, with an ending computer speed of 16.5 mph, getting into the host at 12:10 or so, after a really heavy rainfall for the last few miles. showered unpacked the trailer set up etc, got to a bar (chameleons?) to order chicken strips (ok, i got a kiddee meal with chicken strips, but like, who doesn't like milk with a straw?) and catch the whole game! YAY

oh hey by the way we're in mount vernon iowa. iowa has a lot of hills. who knew.

and yesterday was the stateline from illinois into iowa, rode with justine, yay it was fun, ok so maybe we were struggle-busing a little bit from miles 75-85, but the end was fine...i rode 97.65 MILES yay....i was tempted to go for another century but then decided it was not worth it...umm i'm not going into detail, nothing was superinteresting yesterday...oh yay sleep is the best goooood night. another 5 am morning coming up!