Julie & Julia

New year, new post! After about 5 months of dust accruing on my bike I finally got around to fixing it. It took all of $20 - for the tool - and 10 minutes to repair, I really should have done this LONG before now! The truth is I was inspired to fix it from a movie. Although it's a bit of a girly movie I'm not ashamed to admit I watched and liked... Julie & Julia! For those of you who haven't seen the movie it is about a young girl who decides to cook all 524 of Julia Child's recipes from her cookbook.... in 365 days! Being based on a true event I thought that was quite an incredible task. Almost 2 recipes a day, and anyone out there cooking (Hope) knows what a feat that can actually be. So I thought "I should do something like that with riding." That's when I decided I was going to ride 3000 miles in 365 days. 3000 might sound like a lot, but its less than 10 miles a day AND allows me to take off 65 days throughout the year if need be.

Of course I used one of my 65 days on the New Year's day to watch all the bowl games - especially PSU vs. LSU which turned out to be way too close in the final minutes leaving my left ventricle nearly collapsed - that meant my first day would start on the coldest day we've had yet this year. With the temperature hitting a stifling 25 degrees I bundled up and headed out. It had been windy all day but I didn't realize how windy it actually was until I rode directly into it. With 20mph winds and gusting to 40mph I struggled the first leg fighting the whole time, averaging around 10mph. Not only did it wear me out quickly the -6 wind chill about froze my fingers, toes and nose. However, on the way back with the wind with me I warmed up and averaged about 22mph... quite the difference!

Unfortunately, after I had headed out and tried taking some pictures I realized I had forgotten to put my memory card back in my camera! I didn't get any photos of this ride - not that I would have wanted to stand in the cold talking lots of pictures anyway. Luckily, Bec took some pictures of me before I left so I have something to record this ride. But after 10 miles in FREEZING weather, I really didn't need pictures to remember this ride.

10 miles down... 2990 to go!