Beckley, WV

The beginning of two torturous days over the Appalachian mountains today was a great day on the bike but I'm afraid I went to hard today and won't have enough left for Blacksburg. I rode in a paceline of three today which was tons of fun but also meant that we split the workload between three less people. My legs felt great today and the thought of being in Blacksburg in two days really had me fired up riding fast.

Today was full of rolling hills and several steep climbs. My pace line took the day fairly easy and since we avoided any major mechanical issues finished about 15 minutes in front of the next paceline giving us time to relax. We prepared for arrival at Mountain State University where they had prepared delicious fruit for us and we moved into the dorms for the evening.

Arrival at Mountain State University

Danny and I headed a few blocks over to the closest bike shop, we managed to find several huge hills between the dorm and the bike shop that we were less than enthused to ride after 70 miles of riding. After the bike shop the three tech boys decided to clean our whips for our homecoming tomorrow. I only cleaned about half of my bike when the crew chief came and found me to go scout the first few miles of tomorrows ride. We were pushing our time limit before we left hoping that we'd have time to scout and make it back to shower before heading out for our evening friendship visit when Murphy's Law held true and we got caught in traffic due to an accident. 2 hours after our departure and a few back country detour roads we made it back to shower and head to the friendship visit with Mountain State Center of Independent Living (the same organization that we worked with in Huntington) for which we were unfortunately very late for.

Jeremy present a grant check

The team enjoyed lasagna and salad and I had the privilege of speaking with one the founders of the organization who informed me about some of the projects they were working on. After dinner the team returned to lodging for about an hour before departing for evening entertainment provided by a connect at MSCIL.

Upon arriving at the "evening entertainment" we instantly knew we were in for a good time as we heard loud engines and fans cheering, we were at a dirt racing track in West Virginia; perfect!
We received pit passes which was really cool since most of the guys had never been around a race track, let alone had an opportunity to walk in the pits and see the cars up and close.

A night at the races!

Blacksburg tomorrow and a very tough ride from what I hear, I can't wait!