Voice Post: 2009 PMC Sat Sturbridge

[ornoth_cycling]

The following is a transcription of a phone post that originally appeared in my main journal, here.

Good morning it's the perfectly dark hour of 5am and I'm lined up in Sturbridge for the start of this year's Pan Mass Challenge. Nice and early, got half an hour yet before the start. So should be all set and ready to go.

Sturbridge here is -- I'm going to work on giving you a few factoids along the way -- Sturbridge is the home of Old Sturbridge Village, which is a 200 acre colonial living museum, a place I visited as a youth and an interesting town.

A little bit further up the road is Charlton, which we'll be passing through about 5:40, where Grizzly Adams, the famous performer for P.T. Barnum's circus is buried.

And a few miles beyond that is Oxford, the birthplace of American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, who was actually born on Christmas Day.

That's the notes until we get to the first water stop, and hopefully things will be good between here and there. It's obviously dark; the roads just are a hair wet but the rain has long since stopped. Most of the roads are dry, at least the primary roads.

So it looks like it'll be a good day. I'm standing here with two or three thousand other cyclists, shoulder to shoulder in the middle of a parking lot waiting to get the firing gun.

Things are still coming together, but looking forward to a great ride. And the next update will probably be sometime around 6:30am, probably also before you're awake. But off we go, and looking forward to a good ride.