Bike Every Mile or Cange Lives??

With a 5:30AM wakeup call we were on our bikes and headed to Walla Walla for a 75 mile ride.  Our rack point was 60 by 11:30AM, which we didn’t make.  Due to rough riding and some flats we got red flagged a lot and were not able to bike as many miles.  Five miles into the ride we got red flagged because of a flat and when I stopped I heard medal fall from my bike.  I looked down to see that the screws of my pedal came out and part of my pedal was laying on the ground next to my bike.  Not wanting to rack I took a screw out of my other pedal and put it in my broken one hoping it would last the day so I could fix it tonight, but it didn’t.  About four miles later it broke again.  So I had to decide to either rack my bike and call it a day or bike the rest of the day with only one clipped in shoe.  And again the power of motivation, teamwork, and the Journey of Hope came through for me and I naturally decided to bike with only one clipped in shoe.  That day I was in a pace line with Joe Konnerman, and after about 20 miles of biking with one working pedal it started getting very hard and started hurting really bad.  But Joe kept telling me to push through it and that I would be disappointed with myself if I racked myself, and he was right.  He didn’t care that we had to go slower than others all he cared about was keeping my mind off my one burning leg and foot that was doing almost all the work.  But I pushed through it for 40 miles, and then we had to rack due to timing and all the red flags we had that day.  We have rack points for when we have programming during the day.  Because even though it is awesome that we are biking across America that isn’t really what our summer is about.  Helping improve the lives of people with disabilities dwarfs our personal goals of biking every single mile everyday.  The biking is just a means to an ends of our goal to change lives across the country during the Journey of Hope.  And even though we may not bike every single mile every day we realize that we can still say that we biked across the country because the route we take is far from straight.  The most direct route from Seattle, WA to Washington DC is only 2,700 miles, the distance from coast to coast is only about 3,200 miles, and the route we take consists of over 4,100 miles!  So as you can see we can miss a few miles in order to change lives and still bike across the country!!  But overall the days ride was amazing and it was awesome to see myself do things and push myself through things that I never thought I could!  After we racked we headed to lodging at the Sustainability Center at the Walla Walla Community Center.  Form there we went to a sponsored lunch at Jim Peterson’s house.  He had amazing food that filled us up and even allowed us to swim in his pool and sit in the hot tub to relax.  When lunch was over we had little time to get back to the Community College to get ready for a friendship visit at the Lillie Rice Center.  We were overwhelmed by their hospitality. It was great again to spread the message of Push America with new people. It brings a lot of joy to them hearing of fraternity men doing what we’re doing.   We ate dinner their while talking to the guests that were there.  It was a lot of fun but after dinner we had to head back to lodging where we got nice and greasy.  We all went outside to clean our bikes, which they needed it badly, under the instructions of Branden Sowers!  Then we were able to relax and enjoy a movie on a projector before going to bed.  Today was an amazing and very important day.  It again showed me that nothing is impossible with the right teamwork and motivation!  It also made us all realize that in the big picture the miles we bike are not as important as they lives we change!!