Ride a Bike

For those of you who like to read the last chapter of a book first here it is, and for the rest of you here it is anyway:

Living a healthy lifestyle that includes a good diet and exercise will improve your quality of living and help you live a longer.

This is not earth shattering news, we all know it is true. The news is filled with stories like this one that says that a healthy diet and lifestyle reduces Alzheimer's disease and the dementia caused by the disease. The story says, "I am in my 50's, what I do now may determine whether I develop dementia when I'm in my 70s or 80s."

My wife's knee needed a few stitches

after she went mountain biking

with me.

I frequently ask myself, "Why am I doing this?" It is very hard to work 14 hour days 6 days a week, with something like 4 days a year off. I have people say to me, "but you are doing what you love." Yes I love biking, but when you have to take out loans so you can pay your property taxes and then they raise the property taxes by another $900 this year, when you struggle to have your wife go to the instacare center to get stitches because you can't afford insurance and can't afford to pay for the stitches, when you can't heat your house in the winter and you struggle to keep the pipes from freezing, and a million other things that you can't afford but you have to do anyway, and then realize that the solution is really simple, "go back to being a programmer and earn a living", when you look at all of this, there has to be more than "you love what you are doing" to make it worth doing.

The thing is, as a computer programmer I would have more free time to go biking. I'm told that the unemployment rate for programmers in Utah right now is 1/2 of 1 percent, and because of that programmer wages are very high right now. I could go back to being a programmer, and love what I am doing, and provide the income my family needs. So why don't I sell my bike store and go back to programming?

I think the answer is two things:

1. I can't give up. I think I am close to getting the bike store to being profitable and getting to where I can provide for my family's basic needs, and I just can't give up when I am this close to making it.
2. I want to make a difference, and I believe I am doing that with my bike store. I believe that biking saved my life, and I believe that I can help others have a better quality of life and a longer life if I can help them get out on a bike and be active.

So, I need your help. A lot of you have donated to my expedition using the GoFundMe project I have set up. If you have donated, I am extremely grateful for your help, if you haven't please consider giving a donation, even a small amount helps. I will be using this expedition to continue my efforts to get more people out riding bikes and improving their lives.

Also I think the nature of this expedition will make for a great return on investment for companies that are willing to sponsor the expedition. We have already had a lot of media coverage, and of course the media coverage will be exponentially higher in December and January as we journey to the bottom of the world. I need some great companies that can understand what a great opportunity this is to get some great publicity. If you know of such a company, or if you work for such a company, let me know.