The route is in!

The title says it all, the route has been announced and it's definitely not without it challenges (uh, can you say hills!)

Glenwood to Davenport - check out the route here: http://ragbrai.com/2011/01/29/this-years-route-glenwood-to-davenport/

So as I'd said previously, we are not going to do the full route this year. I'll admit when I was getting excited text messages about the route (and had drank a couple margaritas) I thought why not do the full week again! But then I read about the hills of day one being 1000 ft more in elevation than last years first day, I decided otherwise.

We plan to start our journey by heading to Altoona on Wednesday night to go to the festival and hang out with our Des Moines area friends and then start riding the next morning. So that means 3 days, Altoona to Davenport.

The interesting thing about this year is that it is ending in Davenport the same weekend as Bix, I'm a little unsure about that because honestly its CROWDED in Davenport that weekend. I'm sure though they have a plan to make it all work, and I'm kind of excited to end in basically my hometown. That also means we can go to Bix fest and listen to some great Jazz music at the end of the ride so I'm pretty pumped up about that. I just hope we have a bit more energy to enjoy it than we did at our end of week bonfire last year... Basically my Dad made us this great bonfire, my aunt and uncle and family friends came out, and all we wanted to was sleep, haha.

Other than that, no actual bike buying or training updates. As I look at my ankle that I managed to fall on a few weeks ago I think that no training will be getting done until I have it looked at by a doctor, and I can't have it looked at by a doctor until I have insurance, but really that's a whole other topic for another time. The real point here is that it definitely doesn't look right and I fear further injuring it while training and I think a foot and ankle doc will be able to tell me exactly just how much training I can do. So prayers that it's just a bad sprain and it is healing and I can be back at the gym soon!

Hard to believe I started this process last year with a broken wrist/hand and no bike, and this year I have a questionable injury to my ankle and no bike, oh wait that's not hard to believe at all that is pretty much the story of my life.