Can the Cheez-Its EVER come out of the machine with just one dollar?  EVER??!!!! Ridiculous.  One more item on the list of evil plots designed to ruin my day(s).  The Gardettos are much more reliable, they have never gotten hung up.  But I don’t want Gardettos.  I want Cheez-Its.

Another American Royal BBQ has come and gone.  Aside from a less-than-favorable spot in the final standings, I’d rank it as one of my favorite years.  I got down to the site on Thursday afternoon nice and early.  I hadn’t planned on going until Friday but I guess I was ready to get things started so I took the day off and got the event under way.  On the downside, I was about 1/2-sick all weekend.  I had a pretty good cold going and never did quite shake it.  (I’m no medical doctor but maybe spending three nights outdoors wearing shorts in 30 and 40 degree weather isn’t a good plan for getting well?)  Thursday was spent getting the spot all laid out and set up for the weekend.  For dinner we grilled up some cheeseburgers with good cigars for dessert.  (Again with the questionable cold-treatment methods…)  Friday we got up to find some great weather.  We spent the day getting ready for the big party;  Finalizing the booth setup, getting all the food ready, etc.  Not my favorite night of the event, but it was a good time all the same.  Saturday everybody got up and decided to take a short break.  We all left the site for a few hours to get some actual sleep and much-needed showers.  By about 1:00 we were all back and feeling refreshed, and it was time to get going on the actual competition.  Beans got turned in at 3:30, then we enjoyed some bbq’d frozen pizzas and it was time to get the longest night of the weekend started.  I was a little concerned about not being prepared for the first frost of the season that was being forecast.  I had a light jacket and a stocking cap with me, and that was about it for my cold-weather preparation.  Turned out to not be a factor.  Kevin had brought down a huge trailor, and we set up a TV in it and watched movies all night.  Still spent the whole night in a lawn-chair, but at least it was warm.  Sunday was the usual blur of activity;  Getting all the BBQ finished and turned in while cleaning up the site and trying to get out before the long lines started.  I must say, I was a bit disappointed in our showing.  It’s not like we expect to win, but come on, it was better than that!  Oh well, I think an event that big is just a crap-shoot anyway.  Our usual goal of not coming in last was met, anything above that is a bonus.

So that was the weekend of my big bike ride.  My entire summer of rather lackadaisical training, come to an end.  I spent the better part of last week convincing myself I would most likely not even finish the 80-mile route, much less my ultimate goal of the 100-mile “century.”  I even went out and started reading up on suggested training plans for 100-mile rides, as if there was anything I could do about it with one week left.  Friday night finally came, and we went out to dinner with the Munkirs.  James and I sat on one side of the table, shoveling pasta and discussing our ride strategy, while Janene & Donette sat across from us and compared insurance benefits.

Saturday morning we met up out in Peculiar at about 6:00 to find an already huge crowd gathered.  I knew it was a pretty big event but was still a little surprised by the number of people.  Turns out there were 2,000 riders registered for it;  I had no idea it was that big.  They even had a DJ set up playing music.  (Bet the neighbors really love that every year…)  The ride was supposed to start at 7:00, but teams and “VIP’S” got to start first, so by the time we finally took off it was close to 8:00.  Our “plan,” such as it was, was to just ride rest stop to rest stop until we ran out of gas.  I think the biggest fault with our training was that 80% of our rides were only 15 – 20 miles long.  That only takes about an hour, so we never really had to think about pacing ourselves;  By the time you start getting tired on a 20 mile ride you’re done.  Our longest ride of the year was 75 miles several weeks ago, and it was an epic disaster.  Although it had been a while since that ride, the pain I was in at the end of it was still pretty fresh in my mind and I wasn’t looking forward to it again.  Anyway, we rode our “plan,” and the next thing we knew we were east of Warrensburg at the lunch stop, about 50 miles into the ride.  Our plan here was to eat lunch and maybe even take a little nap.  As it turned out the food line was crazy-long, and hot dogs didn’t really sound that tasty anyway, so we ended up stretching for about 10 minutes and taking off again.  Soon enough, we were at the 70-mile mark, where you had to decide whether to keep going straight for an 80 mile finish or turn off for the optional 100 mile route.  It really wasn’t even that hard of a decision.  Aside from my stomach being all jacked up on ibuprofen and 5-hour energy shots, we both felt pretty solid.  So, we headed out on the bonus loop, and 6.5 hours after we left Peculiar we were in Sedalia with our first “century ride” under our belts.  It’s really a two-day ride, but we never had any illusions of riding back so Janene picked us up at the finish and we headed back to KC.

Sunday I took for a “recovery” day, didn’t really do much.  Donette signed me up for a massage at the gym so I headed up there and enjoyed that little treat.  Never had a massage before;  It was nice and definitely helped my aching back.  Other than a mild back-ache I felt surprisingly good.  Don’t get me wrong, I was well aware I’d been on a long bike ride.  My legs were pretty sore and I’m still suffering some discomfort in my…  Well…  Errrr…  Let’s just say I sat on a bike seat for 6.5 hours.  Other than that though I think I’m gonna live to ride another day, although that day likely will not be this week.  Two-day ride next year?  We shall see.

Went on a nice lil’ bike ride last night, one of my last before my almost foolish endeavor this weekend.  It went pretty well, with the exception of some still-lingering back pain.  Hopefully that is from my admittedly weak trip to the gym on Monday, and not an after-effect of the ill-fated 75-miler a few weeks ago.  Anyway, last night Munkirs & I went on the Mission Hills ride.  Despite a somewhat fierce headwind I got my 17 miles in at a decent pace.  The route took exactly one hour, which by my math averages out to about…  Oh roughly 17 miles per hour.  I managed to keep up with the front of the group, at the expense of my lungs.  I just can’t seem to breathe when I ride at that pace.  I don’t really understand it either;  I’m down to one or two cigars a week and I try to eat healthy on Saturdays and Thursdays.  Just don’t make no sense.

Another 3-day weekend, excellent.  I took Friday off and drove north to Kearney to participate in the Jesse James Day BBQ with Team Triple Fat Back.  If I was going to rate the actual BBQ competition itself, I would give it a “fair to poor.”  First of all, we got stuck in a crummy spot with barely enough room for all our toys.  Even more unforgivable, (not to mention quite inexplicable,) they had a grand total of four bathrooms set up for the nearly sixty teams out there.  Oh yeah, that was convenient.  Oh well, what can you expect from a low-rent town like Kearney.  (Probably 1/2 our team hails from said town, if that gives you some idea of the place in general.)  Logistics aside, we managed a pretty fair time of it.  Our arch-rivals Bone Deep BBQ (a.k.a. Red Glove) were set up directly behind us, affording us ample opportunity to lob insults back and forth all weekend.  We also shook up the cooking teams a bit, providing some variety.  One of Brice’s friends came up and did the turkey entry, Zim took over on ribs, and I teamed up with Martin to try and collectively revive the troubled brisket entries.  (Joe & Bob still did pork, & Ballew did chicken as usual.)  The results were quite positive, particularly in our brisket experiment, where we rocketed from a consistent “embarrassing” finish to “almost nearly just-below respectable.”  And, most importantly, we handily defeated Bone Deep for approximately the 1500th time in a row.

Despite actually getting a few hours of quality sleep up at the BBQ, I was pretty beat up when I got home Saturday.  I wiped out on the couch and slept soundly into Sunday.  When I finally recovered, I joined Donette and our friend Susan up at Chelly’s Cafe for some breakfast.  We’d never been there for breakfast, and I think everybody declared it a successful venture.  (With the exception of Susan’s french fries, but let’s just not talk about that.)  The only slight snag was that the menu was a bit limited.  We picked a Mexican restaurant with the idea of ordering some Mexican-style breakfast (or at least what we consider so;) French toast or biscuits and gravy weren’t really on our mind or we’d have just gone to Sharps.  Our choices were pretty much limited to juevos con chorizo or menudo.  We all went with the chorizo;  Menudo is a little too adventurous.  Everybody agreed it was good though!  After our late breakfast it was nearly football time, so I settled in on the couch and commenced to wasting the day.  I made it through most of the afternoon game when Donette finally insisted I try and fix our stupid computer, which in all fairness has been broken for quite some time.  For over a year now it’s run just fine as long as you never turn it off.  If it was powered off it would take somewhere between 10 and 10 million tries to get it to come back on again.  The obvious solution to this was to just never turn it off, but when I quite accidentally shut it down Thursday night it decided to be extra stubborn about coming back on.  So, when we still didn’t have a computer by Sunday, I grudgingly headed out to Microcenter to start buying random parts.  As luck would have it, I hit it on the first try this time around;  A flaky power supply.  As I told Donette, if I had any confidence that would actually fix it, I’d have bought something different, as the one I picked doesn’t really fit very well.  But, I got it crammed in the case and it’s up and running now, so I doubt I ever swap it for another one.  We celebrated this monumental event with a delicious pizza up at 75th Street, and called it a weekend.