Trevor doing the Tour Divide

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My buddy Trevor Browne is racing the Tour Divide. What’s that you ask?

“Tour Divide is a solo, self-supported mountain bike race on all 2,745 miles (4,400 KM) of ACA’s epic Great Divide MTB Route. With an average time-to-completion of three weeks in the saddle, this grand tour is the longest, most challenging MTB race on the planet. It’s a contest for the ultra-fit but only if ultra-prepared for myriad contingencies of backcountry biking.”

That’s crazy.

4,400 KM in 3 weeks

trev_map

He has provided instructions for how to REALLY follow along…
(they all carry real time GPS devices so you can see where they are)

“Everyone keeps asking how they can follow the race this year. Well its easy. By going to the following 2 sites you can literally follow my every move.

The sites are:
tourdivide.org
MTBcast.com

If you go to the tourdivide.org website you can follow the race via the SPOT and google maps. Simply go to the menu on the right hand side of the page and click on the tab that says leaderboard. That will bring you to the SPOT leaderboard where all the racers will be seen as blue dots. Then just scroll over each dot to see who it is. You can also check out the blog portion of the site where you can read updates during the race.

The other way to follow the race is through the MTBcast.com website where you can actually here my voice as I call in at certain checkpoints along the way. On the right hand of the site you will see the 2009 Tour Divide Racer Audio list. From there scroll down the racer list until you see my name (at the bottom). Click on my name and it will bring you directly to my audio posts.

See you on the map!”

It starts Friday the 12th of June. Trevor’s a great guy (he helped find my new bike this past winter!!) and an amazing athlete. Cheer him on and send him your best wishes.

Trevor’s biking blog | tourdivide.org

This is water


Surface Eclipse
Was reading this at lunch and thought I’d share it…

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address By David Foster Wallace, May 21, 2005

Greetings, and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005.

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?””

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Continue reading “This is water”