FLASH-POINT BLOG ARCHIVE: Sep 2008

I came home last night to a big box sitting in the living room floor.

What can Brown do for me? He can bring me a brand spankin' new set of FP80's! :)

I quickly de-boxed the wheels and sat staring at them for several minutes, just spinning them in my hands. They look even nicer in person than they do on the website. And lighter than I expected.

A cassette and tires will be installed today and if all goes well (weather, etc.), I will be taking them on their maiden voyage Saturday morning.

Thanks so much, Flashpoint for this wonderful opportunity...

I remember saying that quite a few times this summer.

We would stop along the route to get snacks or refill our water or go to the bathroom... and inevitably, someone would ask us what we were doing - our jerseys and bikes and our general psychotic sleep-deprived demeanor made us very obviously outside of the norm.

And so, enter canned spiel: "We're part of a group called Bike and Build. There are 32 of us, and we're biking across the country and building houses for affordable housing groups, like Habitat for Humanity. We each raised $4,000 before starting the trip, so our group raised $130,000 before we left. There are 7 different routes traveling across the country right now, so there are about 210 of us biking and building across the US. We're the Southern route. We started in Jacksonville, FL and are finishing in San Francisco, CA in August. Look, you can see our route on the back of my jersey - we're the yellow line traveling across the bottom of the country..."

And it's not that I wasn't enthusiastic about it; I was - and really, that little speech was part of the whole point of the trip. We were supposed to be spreading awareness as we rode across the country; otherwise, we might as well have just stopped in one place and built for the entire summer...

But, as our legs and minds got tired and we occasionally got frustrated with biking and each other, it was sometimes hard to muster up enough pep in my voice. Sometimes I just wanted to drink my chocolate milk and not think about anything else.

So today on the way back from teaching Spinning, as I stopped at a convenience store to get milk and cereal and got questioned as to why I was wearing spandex and dripping sweat all over the aisles, I smiled and told the guy I was a Spinning teacher at the gym up the road. He started to tell me about someone he knew who rode 80 miles over the weekend. I smiled and nodded (hell, it's more than I did this weekend!), and he asked me if I had ever done that sort of thing.

I grinned, and said yes - over the summer I biked across the country - from Florida to California... and I helped build houses along the way. And I realized I had a note of pride in my voice. I went on with the speech and it didn't feel forced or contrived. I was talking about it because I wanted to - because it's worth talking about. The guy was duly impressed, told me I was a good person, and held the door open for me as I left.

I don't know if I deserve the 'good person' treatment, but I do know that the little time away from Bike and Build has renewed the spark; I knew it was awesome at the time, but it's just easy to get bogged down in the every day trivialities and forget that what you're doing is kind of amazing.

The 2009 Bike and Build applications are online and I spent the better part of an hour just clicking through the different routes and letting my heart beat and mouth water with anticipation... I'm thinking of being a leader next year. There's a new route (South Carolina to Santa Cruz) that features a week long Blitz Build in Colorado Springs, CO where you build an entire house. It's the longest route to date (10 weeks and 4,500+ miles, I've heard), and travels up the Rockies instead of 'just' over them.

I'm not committing yet; I have too much going on right now to know what I'm going to be doing this summer... but it's definitely on my mind. Being a leader would be good for me; both with organizational skills (procrastination, anyone?) and with being able to assert myself in a group situation (public speaking is not exactly my forte; think I could get away with just playing the flute in morning circle?)...

At the very least though, now Bike and Build is novel again, and regardless of what next summer brings, I can't wait to get back on the road and be questioned about what the hell I'm doing in a stinky uniform jersey at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere.