Day 13: Friday 6/22/07 - Paying for the first 100 miles.

Today we rode175 miles from Batesville MS to Forest MS. I didn’t carry my camera because it wasn’t focusing properly. Here is a picture that Andrew Puddy (from Australia) took a few days ago when Brad Haslam crashed and dislocated his knee cap. The story goes that Brad was holing his leg in to keep it from hurting as much and really wanted to have a picture taken to record the event before they hauled him to the hospital.


My day began asking Lon for a wheel magnet. He had one. I lost mine in the incident with the construction wire yesterday. Anyway I got the magnet installed and used a couple zip ties to re-secure the pick-up sensor.

We started in the fast group again, but the second group (starting 1 minute back) caught us in the first mile or so while we were sitting at a stop light. Anyway the group was a bit larger for some reason. Eric had planned to skip the first stop, and I found out later that “fast” Mark Pattinson wanted to miss it too in order to get it down to a smaller group. It worked because we were down to eight or so. Eric took his pull and then fell out of the group. The rest of us went on. Charles Breer and Peter Beeson didn’t stay in at the next stop. Then Don Maggie dell out of the group and then, with 130 miles to go, it was down to three of us – Mark Pattinson, Scott McIntosh and myself. We worked together until mile 100. I checked my watch and we had just done a 5:04 century. Then my sanity came back and I decided I didn’t want to work that hard any more. I rode to lunch at 107 miles and left as Peter and Charles were coming in. I wanted to go easy after the hard morning and let lunch digest. I rode the next ~30 miles alone, wondering if I was going to fall asleep, or when would Peter and Charles show up. I was paying for the fast first 100 miles. They did show up with Ed Pabst and we worked together to the 175 mile finish. I continued to pay for those early miles feeling sluggish and tire in the 95 degree heat. We finished at 4:45 PM doing the 175 miles in 10 hours 15 minutes.

There are only four more days left to this adventure. Two nights in Alabama, and two (including the night after the finish) in Georgia. We have gone over 2,000 miles so far.

Here are two pictures of Mississippi that Eric Hallam took and said I could use.