San Jose LiveStrong Ride Part 1

Saturday was pretty much a mess.

We decided to try to get some sleep and pack in the morning. It was a rushed morning of me cleaning my bike, swapping cassettes (twice) and packing the bike in it's traveling case.

Bender convinced me to do the LiveStrong Ride on my Zipp 404s. I thought the best way to go would be to ride the Zipps and bring the "everyday training wheels (Bontrager Race X Lite)" in case I got a flat on the Zipps. I was going to have a support car of sorts thanks to Cezanne and the small SUV we rented.

Long story short, I removed the cassette from my Bontrager rear wheel, put it on the Zipp, packed the bike, packed the Zipps, could not fit the Bontragers, removed the cassette off the Zipps, put it on the Bontragers and packed the Bontragers. We planned to leave for the airport at 10:15 am and I started all these shenanigans at 10:00am.

I always get strange looks at the airport with the huge bike case. Some kids (with their parents) asked what was in it and I told them it was a person because we didn't want to pay for the extra seat. They didn't really laugh and in hindsight, it might have scared the kids. Oops.

I hate to travel with the bike because I'm fearful of it getting busted up. We took the extra step of putting a "Fragile" sticker on top of the case and wrote "keep upright" on it.

We usually pick up the case at the "oversized baggage" claim. Cezanne and I almost lost it when the we saw the case come up out on the ramp of the normal baggage carousel and then crash down into the side railing (like normal, just louder with more force it seemed). We were pissed. That's not how "fragile" things are handled and it definitely wasn't upright!

We always open it up just to take a look at things, but we couldn't! There are 2 places to put a lock on the case and both of those metal places were bent! We couldn't unlatch it because the metal was bent over the latch, on both of them! How does that happen?

The head baggage guy finally came over and he brought a hammer and screwdriver and bent the metal back and said sorry. That was that. We were pissed.

Funny thing is that I saw a girl that I went to highschool with! She was on vacation with her kids. Her hubby is a Navy guy and they are currently down in Kingsville where he is the XO of one of the Training Squadrons.

We got to the rental car place and got all set up and headed out to see where the hotel was. Easy. We went to go get some lunch before checking in (we were a little early and didn't try to check in). We got to the hotel and started unloading the rental when all of a sudden Cezanne says, "Chris! Where is our green bag?!?!"

We couldn't find the bag we checked which had all of our clothes including my cycling clothes. Not a good feeling. We surmised that we must have been so worried about getting the bike case into the rental that we left our bag in our rental spot! Luckily we called and when the lady went to check for it, she found it and we went and picked it up. Whew!

So, we finally got it together and went to Santana Row and had dinner at Thea's Mediterranean Bistro. It was really good. Pic of Santana Row below.



We didn't see this until later, but I guess they REALLY man-handled the case. You can see the metal is bent in here. The white pvc pipe goes in the middle (you can see the little rubber nubs on either side to the right of the pic) so the case can't get crushed. I guess they need some towards the sides too. The best part is that when checking this case in Southwest makes you sign a waiver that holds them accountable if the case is lost, but not if there is any damage. Something wrong with that picture.


Here's another view of the bend. What did they do? Jump up and down on it? I think the "fragile" sticker makes people treat it in the opposite manner.


We got some goodies in our check-in bags from the Lance Armstrong Foundation.


Like they have every year, you can fill out different cards to attach to your jersey. I wore the Survivor and In Memory of Brenda (Cezanne's Mom) cards. Cezanne ran the 5k and she wore the "Mom" one.


It's really nice that they have these for people to wear. I had about 4 or 5 people tell me congratulations for being a survivor.

The ride on Sunday was the best ride of my life, for a few reasons. All that info is coming in the next blog but here is the low-down on the ride stats: 94.71 miles, 5 hours 4 minutes 11 seconds of riding time, average speed of 18.8mph, 5,350ft of climbing, average heart rate of 155bpm.