15 . . .

We turn our bikes in to Tri Bike Transport tomorrow to be shipped to NY, so this was our last ride on our bikes before the race. Derek and I did about 50 miles, up to Nicasio and back. A pretty hot and hilly ride, but it was nice to ride for less than 5 hours for the first time in a long time. The legs felt good.

I bought new tires last night and swapped them for my old tires, and switched out the tubes as well. Good practice for a flat tire during the race, this process is a bit of a struggle as the tires are new and very inflexible, but I manage to muscle them on all by myself. Our living room has literally turned into a bike shop. See below":

It's an anxiety inducing process as I check over the bike to make sure all of the parts appear to be functional because it conjures up images of all of the things that could possibly go wrong on race day. Tomorrow we will put every piece of gear we need for the bike portion into a bag and ship it off with the bike. If we forget something, we can certainly bring it with us, but the essentials are packed away - helmet, shoes, etc. This Tri Bike Transport company better live up to their end of this deal. . . they truck all of our gear across the entire country - from SF to Lake Placid, NY. The bike shop in town, Placid Planet, supposedly has everything we might need and is open 24 hours a day leading up to the race, but it feels odd to send off my beloved Blue Wave - we have hardly been separated for the last 10 months!