Banana Ride

We survived the first annual Banana Ride on Saturday! Truth be told, it wasn’t that bad – which is good news, because it was 20 or so miles less than the distance we’ll need to cover in any given day when we tackle the TransAm next summer! The Banana Ride was a benefit for Girls, Inc., a great national organization that helps to empower young women. Introduction to an organized ride, for those who haven’t been there before:

1. Registration - You usually have to check-in when you get there (you’ve pre-paid and registered online beforehand) and pick up your t-shirt if you ordered one. You’re given a bracelet to ID you as a registered rider for SAG stops, and post-ride festivities (FOOD!) and a cue sheet. The cue sheet is your map for the ride, but luckily they usually have the route marked in spray paint on the pavement (I’m not good at reading maps as I ride!)

2. The Start - Some rides have a shotgun start, similar to a 5k run where the whole group begins at once. This is possibly more annoying than a foot race start, because there are inevitably a bunch of people who tip over on their bikes almost immediately (no major injuries!), and everyone has to dodge around everyone else for the first mile or so. This ride started at your leisure, which was perfect. No stress, no worrying about 75% of the group passing you up at racing speed in the first hundred yards, no dodging slower riders.

3. Routes - Most organized rides have several routes with varying mileages – from 1 mile family routes, to century (100 mile) routes. The Banana Ride offered several of these options, and we opted for the “Gone Bananas” route, which was the longest at 53K (should have been about 32 miles, was actually just over 34 miles). This is another running theme – distances are definitely approximate, and can vary, we’ve found they’re typically longer than advertised, which does very mean things to you mentally when you know you should be nearing the end of a ride!

4. SAG (Support and Gear) stops – these are little oases, especially on longer rides. They offer several re-fueling options, from Gatorade and water, to bananas and home baked goodies! There are usually a couple of these on the longer routes – and the Banana Ride had 3 of these on the 53k route!

5. Roads – the rides we’ve been on in rural settings take place usually on county roads. They are still open to auto traffic, so you have to be aware and still follow all the rules of the road. There is a really fun ride we do called the Nite Ride in downtown Indianapolis every year, where they close off 20 miles of city streets for a couple of hours in the middle of the night and bikes completely take over the roads. While this is a much safer option, it isn’t cost effective for these smaller rides raising money for a specific cause (there are many permits and the paying of off-duty police officers involved), or really feasible to trap people in their homes on rural roads for 3-4 hours on a Saturday morning. There was a rider struck by a vehicle on the Banana Ride this year, luckily only suffering some minor injuries – but it just goes to show how careful you have to be, whether you’re out alone on a training ride or on an organized ride.

6. The End – Ahh, the glorious finish. There are always a variety of wonderful options to assist you in consuming twice the calories you just burned off on the ride. This time, it was pizza and barbecue, but being the good vegetarians that we are, we stuck with cheese pizza. The post-ride food doesn’t even have to be good – at this point, you’re just hungry, and will eat nearly anything. We took our seats at the elementary school cafeteria tables, and devoured some pizza, then headed back home for a much needed nap.

Well, that was long-winded, but maybe intriguing to those of you who were interested to know how an organized ride works. We’ll work as many of these organized rides into our training schedule as we can – they tend to keep us accountable, help out some great causes, and are really just fun.

Hopefully you enjoyed (and didn’t get motion-sick from) our lovely on-bike filming via iPhone. Next time, we’ll remember to bring our flip camera with a bendable tripod and see if that works a little better. And for the record, I’m making Mel do all of the video editing, because I can’t stand the sound of my own voice on video! I’d probably delete the whole damn thing and call it a day, but where’s the fun in that?

Raise The Roof 2012 Recap

Raise the Roof 2012 was an incredible experience for Erica and I. It was our first time attending the event, and a trip that we had been looking forward to for months. We spent quite a bit of time preparing our speeches and even recruited Erica’s parents to help us make our preview video.

We were really excited to reveal our bike trip to everyone after keeping the project a secret for so long! When we spoke with Brandi and Catherine back in July about making this fundraising effort a reality, it was so difficult to not tell all of our friends and family about how excited they were, and share all of the great things we were going to do to raise money and awareness for the Looking Out Foundation. A few short weeks before the event, we went into project overdrive, getting t-shirts printed, building a website, Facebook page, getting informational postcards printed, and even getting a large banner printed with our logo (thanks JK and Cindy for the logo – we love it!)

A big highlight for us at Raise the Roof was getting to be a part of the event – as intimidating as it might have been! Bert took us backstage, where we got to say hello to Brandi, Tim, Phil, and catch the adorable Baby Jo eating some dinner. We also got to speak with Hillary Zuckerberg from the Why Hunger organization, and Kim Bogucki from the If Project; both of these organizations are doing amazing things that really make a positive impact on the world. Go check them out, and get involved where you can! Why Hunger and The IF Project

After our presentation, we got to hang out in the back of the room and talk to people about our trip, answer questions, and just meet a whole bunch of amazing people that love Brandi’s music and support her foundation. We were able to connect with so many people who are willing to help us out to make this journey a success, and that means the world to us.

So, for all of you who were able to hang out with us at Raise the Roof, thanks for listening to our presentation and laughing along to our video, for coming back to say hello, taking a postcard, and for donating. We left the Triple Door smiling that night and more determined than ever to make Looking Out Across America a success for the Looking Out Foundation.

To Holly, Bert, and the rest of the team that put on this fantastic event each year…thank you seems to hardly cover how much we all appreciate what you do. You all are a special group of people that have inspired us to make a difference where we can, so thank you for everything! Mel

Launch Video

For anyone who hasn't seen it already on Facebook, here's the Looking Out Across America launch video that we premiered at Raise the Roof in Seattle last weekend!  Enjoy :)

Looking Out Across America - The Beginning

I’m not even sure how I stumbled upon the website www.crazyguyonabike.com, but I do owe my obsession with the TransAmerica Trail to it. It was probably mid 2009 when I found that site, and I spent weeks on end reading the journals of past TransAm riders. I was hooked. There were all kinds of people setting out on this trek – those fresh out of college, retired grandparents, people in the midst of a mid-life crisis taking a leave of absence from corporate America, people traveling in large groups, young women tackling it alone, families with young children – EVERYONE. At first, it was just entertainment, but eventually the pull of this trip had its claws in me, and I became obsessed with actually doing this myself one day.

The more I talked about this with my then-fiancee now wife, Mel, the more excited she got about it too. The TransAm had become something I felt compelled to do now, either alone or with my partner in crime - so Mel jumped on board and said she would go with me (though I think she was quite a bit more reluctant about it, since she hadn’t spent much time on a bike since she was a kid, and hadn’t ever had a bike with gears). Not that I had that much biking experience as an adult, other than spending some time riding around my neighborhood on a hand-me-down mountain bike during an unfortunate month that I spent unemployed years ago after being laid-off, but I did have experience on a 10-speed.

But, then reality started to set in…and the doubts started to appear in my periphery. How could we ever take 3 months off work? Could we actually pedal over 4,000 miles from the Atlantic all the way to the Pacific? Is this trip really as dangerous as some people would like us to think it is? Even if we could take 3 months off work, how will we pay for the normal life expenses (mortgage, student loans, etc.) AND afford the expenses we’ll have on the road? Oh, and this 3 month break from work would have to be UNPAID. Ouch. It seemed impossible.

So…we began speaking of this trip as though it would happen someday, but never gave it a definite date. This happens with a lot of goals in my life, I dream big, but have problems implementing the plans - I'm working on changing this as I get older though. I knew this one would be different somehow, so we did what any two rational people would do – started buying gear! Oh, gear…is there anything more exciting than buying the stuff that goes along with adopting a new hobby? The first purchases were, obviously, the bikes. We opted for the cheapest road bikes we could find, had them shipped to our house, and assembled them ourselves. Good to go, right? Well, not exactly. You see, Mel is short - really short. They don’t really make many adult bikes that fit her well. Bottom line is that her bike was too big, and she felt very insecure riding it, and I started doubting that she’d still want to make the trip with me.

Many people who ride the TransAm do so on a bike called the Surly Long Haul Trucker. Naturally, I started coveting this bike, so in the Spring of 2011, I decided to just go ahead and buy one. They’re fairly expensive, so this was a big commitment towards someday actually doing some bike touring. Mel got a smaller road bike around the time I got my Surly, and then decided she wanted a Surly too earlier this year, so now we’re both equipped for some heavy-duty bike touring. And of course, in between buying bikes, we bought bike shorts, jerseys, bike sandals, bike racks, panniers (bike bags), bike computers, gloves, and so on. R.E.I. loved us - so much so that they finally put a store in Indiana! (That was just a coincidence I’m sure, but we’ll take some of the credit!)

But alas, gear does not a trip make. It was still not much more than a dream somewhere out there on the horizon. Sometime in 2010, it clicked with me that many people ride for a cause – they raise money for diabetes, or cancer, or any number of other causes. We could do that, right? That’s when I had an epiphany – we’re big fans of Brandi Carlile’s music, she and the twins have a foundation - ding! We decided the Looking Out Foundation would be our cause of choice for fundraising efforts, but we still had no idea what that would actually look like in practice.

I started putting together a fundraising proposal in late 2010 with the intent of getting it to Brandi at a concert. I honestly cannot tell you how many times that we printed that thing out, brought it to a show with us, but for whatever reason the stars never aligned and it just never happened. It was really for the best though, because I think the timing was finally perfect when I nervously pushed “send” and sent the proposal we’d agonized over for about a year and a half off to the powers that be at the Looking Out Foundation. A few months later, here we are kicking off Looking Out Across America, and partnering with the Looking Out Foundation to make a difference with this ride.

We are extremely honored and humbled that Brandi, Catherine, Phil and Tim are as excited about this project as we are, and have agreed to partner with us on this to make it a resounding success for the Looking Out Foundation. We lead relatively low-key, average lives, so having the chance to actively do something to help the various organizations supported through the Looking Out Foundation is thrilling and a challenge that we couldn’t be more pleased to take on. Hopefully we can do this honor justice.