Lour de Toren

A few years back I started a super small bike ride to help keep people riding and socializing during the winter. One of my great customers holds a bike ride in August that is quite possibly the most well organized and evolving ride ever known to the personal riding scene. I decided it needed a counter part on the opposite end of the scale.

His ride is in August, mine is February. His is 100 miles, mine is kept to 10 miles or less. His is meticulously organized, mine comes together out of nowhere, sometimes in the nick of time, and has essentially no organizing sans the start date, time and place. His has two sag vehicles (3 last year), food, mechanical help, GPS, route launching parties, etc. Mine... well, none of that. His has 4 stages, with 3 rest stops. Mine, actually has the same. Some ideas are too good to mess with.

Tonight was the planning session to decide where the ride is to start. I already decided on a date and time, so choosing a starting point was just a matter of picking from the napkins. The first planning meeting we had was when we decided to draw from the messenger bag for a starting location. No one had paper, so we used napkins. 5 years later, minus the ones that have been drawn for the previous 4 starts, those napkins still go into the drawing.

I am looking forward to another 10 mile killer. This is really some of the hardest miles I ride during the year.