NEW BIKE! (Duh)

If you don't already know, the Trek 1500 is no more. I've sold it as last week I've moved on to bigger, better, slower and heavier things.

Last week after going on a ride through the Schenectady Bike Path along the beautiful Mohawk River in Upstate NY, I decided to go to a local bike shop (LBS) that I had heard about. I walked into the shop and was immediately impressed by their huge selection, the warehouse style shop was several thousand square feet filled with different types of bicyles and more so they were the brands that I love, Trek, Cannondale, Giant, etc.

After a few minutes of walking around I asked an employee if they had any touring bikes for example the Trek 520, (which I had been lusting after for months). He informed me they did have one that they got in last week. And he showed it to me. As I had done my research and knew that I was likely to best fit the 21inch frame as that is a 53.3 cm frame. To my delight they had that frame in stock. I immediately took it for a test ride.

Upon my return from the test ride, It was of course obvious that I had to have the bike. I attempted to trade in my bike for the new one, but the shop was only able to offer me $100 so I kept it (and eventually sold it the following day on Craigslist). Even so, I haggled a bit with the store employee and reached a price that was acceptable to me and bought the bike.

Since the purchase I have taken the bike out on the streets of Albany, and am loving the 700c X 32 tires as they are much thicker than the ones on the 1500. The bike is heavy steel and doesn't flex or give when I hit a pothole. The riding position is more upright and I can even comfortably use the drop handlebars. All in all it is amazing. More observations to come.

First training ride of the sesaon

Earlier today Mitch and I went out for our first training ride this Spring. We rode from Fort Lee, NJ, near the George Washington Bridge, up to Piermont, NY and back. We rode a total of 28 miles through mostly rolling hills and some steep ones once we entered Rockland County. We were going to ride all the way to the Tappan Zee Bridge but once we started seeing those "trucks use low gear" signs we saw all over Vermont we figured since it was our first time out we shouldn't kill ourselves and turned around.

JDRF Ride to Cure Diabetes September 13 Whitefish, MT

Mitch and I signed up for the JDRF Ride to Cure Diabetes in Whitefish, Montana in September. We plan on riding 105 miles near Glacier National Park. I know you're probably thinking "Montana? Why Montana?" Valid question, but when else would we ever have an opportunity or the desire to go to Montana? By the time we complete our California Bike Trip we should hopefully be in good enough shape to be physically capable of riding 105 miles in one day (without all the gear we'll be carrying in California.) The JDRF Ride to Cure is a weekend long event focused on raising money to find a cure for Type 1 Diabetes. Mitch and I have committed to raise a total of $8000 between the two of us. My family and I have participated and fund raised for JDRF walkathons for many years. Last year when I first heard about the JDRF Ride to Cure I immediately knew it was something I wanted to do no matter how intimidating the actual ride sounds or how difficult it might be to raise all of the necessary money to participate. I'm looking forward to a great weekend in September. In order to maximize the impact of everyone's donation I'm looking to pool together as many donations as possible since my employer will match my donations. If you are interested in donating please consider sending me a check so I can submit a matching donation to JDRF. Otherwise below are the links to mine and Mitch's rider donation pages.

Mike's Biker Donation Page
Mitch's Biker Donation Page

Other Necessities

and don't forget the purchase of a digital camera to record many outakes we will undoubtedly have on this trip.

We've got business cards

Last year on our Vermont Bike Trip we realized business cards were a necessity. A lot of the people we met along the way seemed to be very interested in our trip and asked for the blog address. We figured we'd make things easy by creating custom business cards to pass out to our fans we meet along the route in California. Plus these will be quite the collector's item someday. Next on the list of improvements for this year's trip...custom bike jerseys and bike hats.

When will the snow in Albany stop?

So, I'm sitting in the basement of the library at school with a window right above me and its still horrible weather out. Its almost March. We probably (I'm totally guessing) got 6 inches of snow yesterday and right now its snowing/raining. I'm pretty sure that it didn't do this last year. This may be the most days of a winter that I've seen snow in my lifetime. Now normally, I don't mind it, and to be sure my car can drive over it like its not there, but I can't ride my bike in it. I don't feel comfortable riding even if there's no snow but might be ice. SO WHEN WILL IT END?

On another note, it IS almost March and we all know what day March 2nd is.

I'm Still In!!!

So thanks to the rallying of my teamates as well as my Dad's generosity, I'm back in the game and extremesly excited. I didn't have to punk out as I thought I would for most of the week. The website we used to book our flights is called cheaptickets.com, and thanks to my poor planning the tickets ended up being anything but cheap.

The trip will now begin on Friday May 30th and we will be returning on June 8.


Update: We changed our Hotel reservation dates in Santa Barbara and San Francisco so the only thing changing are the dates, the price and the fact that we're flying in and out of a Newark instead of JFK (bonus!) Huge thank you to Terry Lubin for making this possible-Mike

Jesse May Be Bailing

We need all your help to convince Jesse Daniel Lubin to go on the bike trip this summer. Obviously in Jesse Lubin style he "forgot" he had a wedding in which he was in the wedding party the Sunday that we leave. Mike and I have been persuading him to come on the trip because the "three of us are a tripod and if you knock one of our legs out we all fall!!" Everyone leave your comments and start convincing Jesse to come on the trip we all know he needs a couple months to get his bearings straight. Plus, I went straight from a wedding last year.

Update...2/15/08...Terry Lubin to the rescue perhaps...stay tuned

Itenarary Update

Since we are travelling on Memorial Day Weekend we figured it was prudent to make hotel reservations for the trip well in advance of the trip. We booked the hotels on both ends of our trip this weekend. When arrive in Santa Barbara at 10pm on Friday May 23rd. We're going to stay at the strategically located Best Western in Goleta; it's less than 2 miles from the airport and the DHL store where our bikes will be shipped and it's along the bike route. Six days later we'll be staying at the Westin St Francis in San Francisco (thank you Accenture for the Starwood Points we'll be using for the 2nd year in a row.)
Next step is planning our overnights along the route...

P.S. Congratulations to the Giants for a great run to the Super Bowl Championship. I never thought I'd see anything that topped the NFC title game and Super Bowl back in 1990 but the games this year were amazing and topped the 1990 games. Go Big Blue!

Still Training

Training for the half-marathon and our bike trip is going relatively well. I've been hitting all my pace goals so far and haven't been overly stressing my body. I dropped a pound and a quarter this month and hopefully when I move out of my house and have to live on Ramen Noodles again I'll be able to lose some more lbs. I'm looking to follow Hal Higdon's half-marathon training guide and see how it goes. It provides for some cross-training workouts so I will get some bike training in along with the half training. I hope it all goes well. I'm also looking into getting a helmet camera for our bike trip this summer so we can update our fans with some videos when we get back and have endless hours of entertainment to relive well after this trip is finished.

Oh yeah, Happy Superbowl Sunday...GO GIANTS!!!