Team Defiance's New Begining

They say, "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step," but this journey does not have steps. It is one of accumulated miles. Miles added on in the possibility of good weather, or that which would make me want to stay inside. Who knows - this journey may never ever be completed.

Today I had the crazy idea of riding my bike 5,000 miles in one year time. That is about 13.69 miles a day. Or for my own ease of math - 14 miles day. Every day. For a year. By why do this alone? So I asked my best friend Jason to try to do it as well, making a combined mileage of 10,000 miles.

The hard part is the fact that at this very moment I do not own a bike. I did, but it was stolen from my car on New Years Day. Not exactly the best way to ring in a new year, but hey, it's how my year began.

Luckily my insurance will cover the replacement and soon I'll be on the road again. In fact, I went out with Jason to look at bikes today. We ended up at Gregg's Bikes near Greenlake. They had the Trek 1.2 I was looking at. (well I originally was going to replace my bike with the same Novara Divano I had, but Jason talked me into this one). The bike is sleek black and red (same colors as my old bike). And that is the key here - the colors. Jason and I have a bike team called, "Team Defiance". And our team colors are red and blue. I get the red, Jason is in blue. And luckily Trek has two similar bikes, mine in red and the next bike up is blue.

So here we are at the store looking at our amazing new bikes and the sales guy ends up coming to talk us through all the things about these bikes as well as try to up-sell Jason on a better bike. Jason's first concern is "do they have it in blue". But in reality Jason never actually said that out loud. We followed our chatty salesman around to the high end part of the store were he went off on all things bike related. He stared using odd acronyms I've never heard of and talking about bike components that I have never heard of. Jason just keeps nodding like he understand completely but I could tell all he was thinking inside was "This fancy expensive bike you are showing me is not blue!" He goes on so long I find I have time to go on my phone and Google some of the buzz words he keeps referring to. Apparently "OCLV" is a fancy type of carbon fiber. New thing learned today.

At the end of it all I put down $20 to get my nice, but not over the top bike placed on hold so I could pick it up tomorrow with the cash I'd be using from my insurance. My bike is black and red.

But we can't start counting the mileage until Jason gets his (blue) bike and his odometer attached. Once that is done the true "Journey of 10,000" miles will commence.

-Ry