Thursday, October 31, 2013

Replacing the Grease in the Bike

I have been working so hard to get the bike and food and gear in the crate, plus trying to keep up with the store, and get everything else done that I haven't kept up on the all the blog stuff. These pictures are from a couple of days ago when I re-greased my bike. I removed all the grease from the shifters when I built the bike, but I didn't put new grease in until I was ready to box up the bike.

In Antarctica there is basically no dirt, at least not on my route. So I don't need to worry about dirt getting stuck in the grease during the expedition. However on my training rides here in Utah I did not want to get dirt in the grease, so I waited until I was getting the bike ready for the crate before using my cold weather compatible grease.

First a picture of the shifter all nice and clean an free of grease.
There is a cover and then an outer ring. Here I have taken both off to be ready to add the grease.

I greased up the shifters making sure that anywhere there is a seam in the plastic it would be sealed by grease. I don't want blowing ice to get in there

Here is the cover with grease to seal the edges.

Putting it back together a little grease is showing where the parts fit together.

Cleaned up.




I also greased the pivot points on the front derailleur, 

and greased the pivot points on the rear derailleur.

XT Shadow Plus derailleur

To make it so the bearings turn easily in the cold I need to replace the grease in the bearings. This is repeated for each bearing in the hubs, bottom bracket, and headset.



Bearing with all the grease cleaned out.

And with the new grease packed in.

And the seal replaced. Ready to go!
Not shown in these pictures is the greasing of the chain. First I clean off all the grease that came with the chain, then heat up the grease for Antarctica, and soak the chain in the grease to make sure it gets between the links. Again I am not going to be dealing with dirt so I can leave the chain greasy and keep ice out of the links. 

Remembering Halloween

Halloween was always the most painful holiday.

When I was a little kid I lived in Fairbanks Alaska. One day when it was about -40ยบ I was ridding on my mothers shoulders. I had a real nice red parka with a fur ruff on the hood that would protect the face from freezing. My mom could not see it but the hood had fallen down leaving my head exposed to the cold. My ears and face ended up getting frostbite.

On Halloween my brothers, sisters and I would head out to collect our candy. We lived in north Orem, which now is a very populated place, but when I was a kid it was still mostly fields and orchards. We had to walk several miles to be able to hit a dozen or so homes. By the time we finished we would have a small bag of candy and my ears would be cold.

As we looked through our candy to see what we got my ears would start to warm up. The frost damage from when I was a little kid would make this a very painful experience.

Halloween was a very different experience for my kids. The houses in our neighborhood are on 5 to 6 acre lots, so it would be much like when I was a kid, however nobody does trick or treat in our neighborhood. Instead we all drive down to the street by our neighborhood park and do trunk or treat. In less than a half hour our kids have collected more candy than I collected in my whole trick or treating career. The problem is since I opened the bike store I don't get to go and hand out candy. To me trick or treat is suppose to be done in the dark, or at least the twilight. Our neighborhood likes to start at 5pm, which means by the time my store is closed trick or treating has been over for almost 2 hours.

Expedition in a Box

Spent yesterday and this morning getting the bike, food and gear into a crate to be ready to send to Antarctica. I was happy that everything fit in the box. I don't know what the final weight is, but it is heavy! Now I need to get the packing list and shipping documents all prepared so they can come pick it up.

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Getting Ready to Ship the Bike

DHL delivered the crate this morning. I am now working on getting everything ready to go into the crate. I added a bunch of logos after I took this picture, and am now adding donor names to the wheels. If you want your name on the wheel, and a picture of it at the South Pole make a $25 donation at www.gofundme.com/SouthPoleEpic and include a comment with the donation stating that you want your name on the wheel. When I get to the South Pole I will take pictures that include each name.
Example of name in wheel

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Autumn Was Invented for Mountain Biking

Took my son out mountain biking today. I rarely get to go biking in the middle of the day, but we had Greg watch the store for a couple of hours while we went and tested out our demo Anthem Adv 1 27.5 bikes.

It has been a while since I have been up to Corner Canyon. The fall colors have are mostly gone, but the trails are filled with the brown oak leaves. I don't know if it is the decaying of the leaves or what but it smelled like autumn. Even with the muted fall colors it was a beautiful ride. At times we were riding on nice single track where the trail is narrower than the tires on my Borealis expedition bike. Near the top of the trail the golden grass was tall and the views of Utah Valley were spectacular.

It was strange riding on skinny mountain bike tires after spending all year almost exclusively riding my fat bike. The Anthem was amazingly quick and responsive. However I am use to the traction of the fat tires and was timid going fast around corners and obstacles. Dropping down Jacob's Ladder is always a blast, but again the small tires were an adjustment.

The lower half of Jacob's Ladder has some fun little switch backs. On of the switch backs has a tree that I am always scared I will hit as I go around the corner. I haven't ever hit it but it is always a bit of a challenge when I ride a 29er. The 27.5 wheels on the new Anthem made that corner a lot better. The smaller wheels are more responsive.

Anyway the trip was great and the whole time I could not help but think, "autumn was invented for mountain biking."

Friday, October 25, 2013

Sunrise

Sunrise on my ride this morning. My grandma would frequently comment that the day's sunset was the most beautiful she had ever seen. I'm sure she would have said that about the sunrise this morning. Strange to think that I only have about 29 more sunrises this year before I enter a world of 24 hours of daylight.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

What Should I Have on My iPod?

Got some more equipment for my expedition today. My oder from Canada Goose came in today. The expedition is everything I expected! Nice and and warm. The last thing I will do before starting to pedal will be to take this off and put it in bag behind my seat, and the first thing I will do when I stop is grab it out of that bag and put it on. I love this parka and could not be more excited about getting it. I also got a nice marino wool neck gaiter, down gloves, and a marino wool toque from Canada Goose. All of these are going to be great down in Antarctica.

I also got my oder from Goal Zero today. I purchased a Sherpa kit and two Guide 10 kits. I will be using these to keep the satellite phones that I am getting from Satphonestore charged, and to keep batteries for the GPS and cameras, and my iPod charged.

I need to clean up my iPod. It has a lot of songs on it that I really do not like. I end up getting stuck listening to them as I am biking and don't want to stop and dig out the iPod to change the song. I am also planning on loading Das Buch Mormon onto my iPod. I have been trying since I was in high school to teach myself German. I have all the Harry Potter books in German and can do a fair job of reading them and figuring out what is being said. Maybe I'll get bored of listening to the German scriptures over and over, or maybe I'll get better at understanding German. Either way when I decided to listen to music I don't want to get stuck listening to songs I don't like.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Pink Cables

One of the things people do for the Iditabike is to put electrical heat shrinking tubing on the cables. At super cold temperatures the cable housing can get brittle and crack. The heat shrinking tubing gives extra strength and will make sure the cables don't break in Antarctica.



After shrinking the tubing and installing on the bike. I wanted the shrink tubing to be red, but the tubing they had at the local O'Reilly store was kind of pink. So I guess I get to ride to the South Pole with pink cables.
I did a test of spray painting the cables red, but it didn't work too good. 

Time Running Out

Crazy trying to get everything ready! Got the tent and pad real nice down gloves, and snow pegs from Bear River Outfitters; TRS+ crankset, and bottom brackets from e*thirteen; handlebar guards, top tube pack, handlebar pack, gaiters, and hoody from Skinz Protective Gear. I've also been working with DHL and BoxPackSLC on getting the crate and shipping for the bike. Also working on the food from Ready Store. I have to get this all boxed up and shipped out next week.

I also have some more details on the bike that I need to write about when I get a chance.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Preparing the Shifters for Antarctica

I have Shimano SLX shifters I will be using on my expedition bike. Shifters have a little bit of grease in them that keeps them working smoothly. However at the extreme colds of Antarctica the grease can get very viscous which could make the shifters not work. So I will be replacing the grease in the shifters with Lubriplate mag 1 grease. 


While I am doing this I might as well remove the gear indicator. I guess it is just some kind of bike snob thing, but serious bikers do not have indicators that tell you what gear you are in. If the pedal speed is comfortable then you are in the right gear. Removing the indicator save a little weight, but in the whole scheme of things really doesn't matter. Anyway first step is to undo the two screws that hold the indicator on.
The shifters come with a cover that can be put in place instead of the gear shifter. And now we have a nice clean looking shifter that is free of the gear indicator.
 To remove the grease I need to open up the shifter. This is easily done by removing one screw on the cover as seen in this picture.
 Here you can see some of the grease. The real problem is the grease on the pawls that can't be seen in this pictures. I fix old shifters in my bike shop all the time that old grease that is all gummed up. The pawls are spring loaded and provide the ratcheting for changing gears. When the grease gets too sticky then the springs don't have enough force to push the pawls against the teeth of the ratchet. Cleaning the grease from the pawls fixes the gears. I don't want to have to do this on the polar plateau.









First I spray in a generous amount of degreaser to loosen up the grease. Then I rinsed the shifters in water. I don't want the water corroding things so I spray some alcohol in the the shifter, and then blow in dry with my compressor.
After all this you can see that my shifter is free of all the grease. The shifters work just fine without the grease and I could just use them grease free like this. However the winds of Antarctica blow around tiny ice crystals that can get into everything. To protect the shifters from getting iced I will add the Lubripate mag 1 grease that stays good at the -40ยบ temperatures that I will be biking in.

While I am working with the shifters I also change the switch on the shifter to make it work with a double crank.

And now my shifters are ready to go to Antarctica.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

New Gear from Shimano and Pearl Izumi


Shimano
2 x CN-HG94 XT 10 speed Chains

  • I'll clean these real good and put Lubriplate Mag-1 grease on them.  I'll give more details about this when I do it.

2 x SM-RT81 XT 160mm Ice Tech Disc Rotors

  • At the cold temperatures and given the rolling resistance of the low pressure in the tires and the snow I don't see over heating being an issue with the brakes. However in my training rides and when I get home I will give the brakes a good workout. I like how the ice tech rotors have worked on my mountain bike and when I get back from the South Pole I will replace my mechanical disc brakes with some SLX hydraulic brakes. I haven't had problems with the Shimano hydraulic brakes in the -15ยบ F temperatures and so I think the hydraulics are good for use here in Utah.

1 x SL-M670 SLX Dyna-Sys Rapidfire plus shifters

  • I think people use other shifters on fat bikes because they are worried about being able to shift wearing gloves/mittens. I have found that even large gloves and mittens have worked for me with the Rapidfire shifters. Sometimes the big mittens interfere a little with the shifting, but have never been a real problem for me. I'm not even going to consider thumb shifters, yuck! I tried twist shifters and didn't like them. When going over technical conditions I end up accidentally shifting with the twist shifters. For me the Shimano shifters have a great feel to them. I like the dual action shifting that allows shifting with the finger or thumb. I find that I use both depending on the trail conditions and hand position.
  • I will clean all of the grease out of the shifters and replace it with Lubriplate mag 1 grease. I get a lot of old bikes in the shop that have shifters that don't work. The problem is the old grease gets gummy and the pawls don't spring into place. Cleaning out the old grease fixes these old shifters. I don't want to have that be a problem in Antarctica. I could just degrease the shifters and go with no grease at all, but I am thinking that some grease will prevent the super fine ice that blows around from getting in and freezing the pawls and preventing shifting.

2 x RD-M786 XT rear derailleur
1 x FD-M676-D SLX front derailleur
1 x CS-M771-10 11-36 XT cassette
1 x CS-6700 11-23 Ultegra rear cassette

Pearl Izumi
Performance + Race Optimized = P.R.O.

1 - PRO Transfer Zip Neck LS Base layer medium weight
1 - PRO Transfer Long Pant base layer

  • Tried these (pants and top) out last night. Very nice feel to them. I like the flat seams for preventing chafing.

1 - PRO Barrier WxB Hood

  • I think I will attach some velcro to the base of the hood and too the jacket so I can attach the hood to the jacket. Also I am getting a fur ruff from Alaska. It will come with a zipper so it can be attached to hoods. I will either add a zipper to this hood for the ruff, or I will replace the zipper with velcro and put velcro on this hood and the hood of my parka so I can move the ruff to whichever I am using.

3 - Elite Tall Sock black/red

  • I usually wear white socks, but mountain biking gets white socks pretty ugly looking quickly from the mud and dirt that they get on them. I am using these socks for the next month before I go since they won't get dirty looking. I like how they feel on the feet. I don't feel any seams and they fit nice snug to the feet without constricting. I sleep in my socks and these worked well for sleeping where as with other socks I have used I wake up with the socks cutting into my feet and legs because they don't stretch or something.


3 - Elite Tall Sock white/black
3 - Elite Thermal Wool Sock

  • I have a pair of these I have used in the past. Great socks, but my older ones have a few cheatgrass seeds stuck in them. The cheatgrass seeds stab the feet and hurt, and getting them out always ends up pulling some of the wool fibers with them. It will be great having new wool socks that haven't had cheatgrass seeds stuck in them. 

1 - Select Barrier WxB Pant

  • The seat area has nice durable fabric that should help it have long wear. The winter pants I had previously wore out in the seat area.
1 - PRO Thermal LS Jersey
1 - PRO Barrier WxB Jacket

  • Love the feel of this jacket. Nice and windproof. Waterproof also, but this will not be an issue in Antarctica. It has some nice vents that can be opened to regulate temperature as I ride and closed when I stop. 

1 - Select Barrier Balaclava - Medium

  • I like how this fits my face. It is important that I don't have any skin exposed. At -40ยบ and 30mph winds frostbite is almost instant. I feel this is going to be a great piece.
1 - PRO Barrier Balaclava - One size
  • Has a bit more of a windproof appearance.
1 - Select Thermal Jersey
  • This jersey is a nice fleece material. It seems it will add more warmth than the PRO Thermal and give me some layering options.
1 - Pearl Izumi - mittens 
  • My hands seem to get cold easy. The wind seems to cut through most gloves and mittens that I have used and my fingers get cold. I still need to try colder temperatures but so far these gloves have worked well. I tried one day putting latex gloves on under the mittens. My hands were nice and warm, but all wrinkled from being soaked in sweat. I will have to try again with a conductive glove and then the latex gloves.
1 - Softshell jacket. 
  • I have been using this for about a year. It has a spot that I melted when I was wearing it while using a Dremel tool and sparks were hitting the jacket. It also has a cut in one sleeve from a crash trying to clear a wood feature in the Eagle Mountain bike park. I have worn this for countless hours both on and off the bike. I love this jacket. I like the chest pocket with the little port for headphone wires. It is nice to have the wires go under the jacket and balaclava to my ears. That way the wires don't get caught in the brush as I am biking. 


Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Epic Journeys

When I decided where to have my bike store I chose the the shopping center I am in because it was the only shopping center in Saratoga Springs. It didn't occur to me at the time that this was along a cross country biking route.

It has been cool to have people drop in as they are on their long treks. I had a guy come in that started in Europe took a boat to Canada and dropped by the store on his way to South America. That was easily the longest trek that has dropped by.

Yesterday a lady dropped in. I'm bad at judging ages, but lets just say she wasn't young. She started in Salt Lake City and was headed to San Diego. We talked a bit about her expedition and my expedition to the South Pole. Interestingly the distance we will both travel is roughly the same.

A bolt had fallen off of her toe strap on her pedals. So I found a new screw, tightened up the rest of the screws on her pedals, she got refills on her water and continued on her way. After she left I thought, "I really should've gotten a picture of her." I need to start collecting pictures and stories of the people that stop in on their epic journeys.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

GPS vs Compass

Looks like the packs and handle bar guards from Skinz Protective Gear will be here soon. It will be interesting to see if the handle bar bag they are making will make it so I can navigate with a GPS instead of a compass. Normally the cold weather kills batteries making compass navigation mandatory. I am prepared to do compass navigation, but GPS navigation will allow me to spend more time down in the aerobars fighting the katabatic headwinds. 

Smith Goggles

Just got some new goggles for the expedition. My old Optic Nerve goggles pushed down on my nose which partially blocked the air path causing the nose to get all stuffed up. These Smith goggles have a better design and don't block off my breathing. Now I need to sew a face mask to the goggles and block off the lower vents. 

Four Point Buck in My Back Yard

Mountain biking in the winter is best when the temperatures are below freezing. The frozen ground eliminates issues with mud and when there is snow the traction on the snow is better when it is solid rather than mushy.

Yeah I know, it is still just fall, but this morning's ride felt like winter. The temperature was just below freezing. The little puddles left over from yesterday's rain had just a bit of ice in them and the places that would have been muddy were solid enough to make for a great ride.

As I started the ride this four point buck was staring me down. He actually started walking towards me to check me out. The digital zoom on the iPod touch gives the picture a strange look, but that is what I had available at the time. 

Monday, October 14, 2013

Flight and Hostel

I just booked my flight to Chile and my room in Punta Arenas. I will be leaving Salt Lake City on November 15 and arrive in Punta Arenas on November 17. I then have 5 days to get everything through customs and onto the plane to fly to Union Glacier in Antarctica on November 23. After I arrive in Antarctica I will have as long as I like to get acclimated to Antarctica. I plan on spending a few days on Union Glacier making sure everything is good to go before I fly down to Hercules Inlet where I will start the bike ride to the South Pole. The drop off location in Hercules Inlet will be on the ice shelf and I will begin by climbing up onto the "coast" of Antarctica and then head somewhat west to get around a large crevasse field before heading South.

I am hoping that the five days I have in Punta Arenas will give me a chance to go and see some penguin colonies and other sights of the area. Once I am in Antarctica I will be far enough away from open water that there will be no plants or animals, so if I want to see the penguins it has to be before I fly to Antarctica.

Things are moving fast. I have a lot of things left to get done before I leave and very little time left.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Alaska Parka

Playing around with my dad's parka.
My dad came over tonight and brought his old parka that he used when we lived in Alaska. It has a nice wolverine and wolf fur ruff, but over the years the long guard hairs on the wolf part of the ruff have mostly come off. I am excited to be getting a new parka from Canada Goose.
As I have said before the new parka I am getting reminds me of the parka I had when I was a kid. It was like the one pictured here only kid sized.
My Canada Goose parka will be too hot to use while I am biking. The last thing I'll do before starting to ride will be to take off the parka and put it in a bag behind my seat, and the first thing I will do when stopping will be to grab the parka from the bag and put it back on. I went and bought a nice jacket that I'll use while on the bike. There were several jackets that could have worked for the expedition. I ended up getting a red one. I need to get a fur ruff to sew onto my jacket.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Right Time — Right Place

Long post. Maybe more than people really want to read, but here it is:

Sometimes it is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. I told my wife that I felt like this opportunity was just placed in my lap. She strongly disagreed saying that it was a great cost/work to do this expedition. She is right, but doesn't quite understand my perspective. I may be a little strange in my thinking, but it seems that my whole life up to this point has lead me to this expedition. I lived in Alaska when I was very young, and then grew up in Utah hiking in the High Uintas. I knew that my father once had the opportunity to go to Antarctica to do research, and that one of the scientists on the expedition died. All this laid a foundation for my expedition.

When I was a teenager my brother got into computer programming. I did a lot of things that my brother did, and so I also got into programming. It started when I was in junior high school. Mike, my brother, was taking a computer class which involved writing programs in Fortran on punch cards. Mike would write his program and then create the punch cards in class. The teacher would then take the punch cards down to BYU and run them through the computer and bring back the print out of the results. It was a difficult way to program because it would take several days to see the results of changes you made to the program.

My father worked at BYU and was able to get my brother and me an account on the computer at BYU. So Mike and I would go to BYU punch up a program on the cards and then take them to the room next door and run them through the card reader and get our printouts. This was a much better way of programming. After doing this for some time the biology department got some Commodore Pet computers. With this computer you could put a cassette tape in the computer and have it read a program off the cassette. This was amazing to me at the time. So we started playing with those computers. One of the programs they had on cassette was called Basic BASIC. It is what truly opened the world of programming to me. It was a simple program that would explain a programming concept, and then give you the opportunity to write a little bit of code to use the concept. This is how I learned to program computers.

The Commodore Pet was so great and so when my father started talking about getting a computer for our house I was so excited. I really wanted to get a Pet. But Mike was looking at different computers. We looked at an Atari and I thought that would be nice, but the computer my brother wanted was an Apple II. I had never seen an Apple and wasn't excited about that computer, but Mike was using them at school and was convinced that was the computer we should get. I really wanted the Pet. However when we went out and got an Apple II+ I was so excited. The computer could be hooked up to a monitor, but of course we didn't have a computer monitor. We bought a little device that would make it so the output of the computer could be sent to a standard TV. We got the computer home and started playing with it. It was fun, but to save and load programs you needed to use a cassette player and hook the audio input/outputs to the computer. It kind of worked, but was not really reliable. So we went back to the computer store and got a floppy disk drive. Without that drive I think the Apple would have been a failure. But the disk drive was great. So much easier than a cassette tape. No more rewinding and forwarding trying to find the correct spot on the tape for the program. You could actually just put a disk in and load the program you wanted. We also ended up adding a little computer monitor to the computer. The Apple II+ was great.

When I got into high school, I took a computer programming class. It was a lot of fun, but I had already taught myself programming using the Basic BASIC program back on that Commodore Pet. Still it was fun to be writing different programs on the computer and to get an easy A. Then my mother decided to take a computer programming class at BYU. One of our neighbors was also in that same class at BYU. I guess programming didn't come natural to them and they wanted a little help. I was young and didn't understand anything about teaching people, and instead of helping them learn how to write their assigned programs I just wrote them for them.

After I graduated from high school I went on a mission for my church. While I was on my mission my two older brothers got jobs at a place called Satellite Software International (SSI). And the day I got home from my mission I started working there also. It turned out that the neighbor for whom I had written those programs was the brother of one of the three owners of SSI. I guess Pete (the brother) thought I was some kind of child prodigy because of the programming I had done in high school. So I started working on a program called WordPerfect. SSI was the creator of WordPerfect and later changed its name to WordPerfect Corp. Good change because we SSI didn't have anything to do with software for satellites. Anyway, WordPerfect was a great company which eventually was bought by Novell Inc., which had a great record of buying up good companies and then destroying them. For years Microsoft tried to kill WordPerfect and couldn't do it, but Novell did it for them. So I ended up being a Novell employee. All the time I was at Novell it seemed they were lost. Once CEO after another would come it and mess up the company and walk away with millions of dollar. The most successful of those CEOs left to join Google.

OK, so what does all this have to do with biking to the South Pole? Well, after years of programming I was a bit over weight. I had my cholesterol tested, and the numbers were bad. I panicked and changed my lifestyle. One of the guys I was working with was really into mountain biking, and I started mountain biking with a group of people from Novell. I loved it, and it fixed my health issues. So, when I finally got laid off from Novell (if you work there long enough eventually you will get laid off) I decided I didn't want to program anymore. I just didn't have the love for it anymore. I wanted to do something to help other people gain the fitness I had gotten from biking. So I opened Epic Biking.

Epic Biking has definitely been a labor of love. I work incredibly long and hard at this but in the end I can't afford to pay myself anything. Sometimes it is really hard for me when it seems everyone is making money of my store except me. I keep getting closer and closer to being profitable and think I will be there soon.

So last year, my friend from Novell that got me into mountain biking asked me about fat bikes. I had seen them before but never really gave them much thought. I had a couple other people talk about the fat bikes, and so I looked at it more, and on a strange whim, I bought four framesets and built up for fat bikes. We got them done right around Christmas time. After a couple of short test rides we went for our first big ride, across the frozen Utah Lake. About this time I learned about Eric Larsen and his attempt to bike to the South Pole. I would read his expedition log, and was surprised when he turned around. Then a customer, Mark, started telling me how he was going to win the lottery and then get some snow cats as support vehicles and we would bike to the South Pole. I didn't take it seriously. But the idea sunk into my heart. I started talking to a neighbor, Todd, about doing this, and then I started doing some searching on the Internet and found ANI and ALE. Somewhere along the line it occurred to me that with ALE's help I could actually do this expedition. So I talked Todd into doing it with me. Todd thought that it would be hard to succeed without support vehicles. I wanted to bike to the South Pole and if that meant with support vehicles I was OK with that, but really I liked the idea of not having the support vehicles. Well, after doing everything I could to raise money for the expedition I just could not get it. But all that work as a computer programmer meant even though I struggle with not having money for day to day living I do have some assets, which enabled me to get a loan for the expedition.

So I was just in the right place at the right time to get into computer programming. It seems it was just given to me. Then I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to help a neighbor with his homework, and then at the right place at the right time to get in at the beginning of WordPerfect, which then led me to Novell and into mountain biking. Then getting into the biking industry, and finally into snow biking. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be able to be the first to bike to the South Pole. It appears that I may be the only bike expedition to the South Pole this year unless Juan is able to get his expedition going. But there are several expeditions that are lined up for next year. So I feel like the privilege of being the first to bike to the South Pole has just been given to me. I just need to make sure I execute the expedition properly. Take care of myself to avoid injury and keep moving to the south and I will make it. It really is an incredible thing, and I am so excited for the expedition, but I am also getting worried about having everything in place in time. So much to do and so little time left to do it.