Two weeks ago I road a 100 miles plus gravel road ride. Last Sunday was a 56 mile epic MTB race. Now for the last 5 days I’ve been roofing a building. And the roofing is by far the hardest of the 3. It’s not like I’m not trained for manual labor. The MTB race should have been pretty good training. Plus, all that cutting and splitting wood should have helped. But, if that was training, it wasn’t nearly hard enough or for a long enough duration.

It’s been 14 hours, plus, a day for 5 days. Mainly stripping tar and gravel with a snow shovel and a pitch fork. We’ve filled a 40 cubic yard dumpster. The dumpster is going to cost a small fortune to dump. I get charged after 5 tons. 5 tons isn’t the tip of the iceberg.

This building is 130 years and the wood is harder than hard. I don’t have too much decking to repair, but when I do have to cut the wood, it is amazing. It almost smokes a saw blade with every cut. A Paslode nail gun will barely shoot a nail through the 1 X 8 decking. That’s crazy.

So, I have 5 more days before rain is forecast. That might not be enough.

On bike racing news, I saw that my MTB race buddy from years ago, Cadel Evans has just signed with Trudi’s team, BMC. Maybe John LeLange can help Cadel HTFU. That also means that the BMC program for riding the Tour has just been accelerated. Trudi has done the Tour a few times with 7-11 and Motorola, but not recently. That should be fun.

Trudi flying her BMC colors for the roofing project.

Portrait of the instigator, Michael Fatka, with Trudi and I.

Full project from above. Notice Catherine, far left, having trouble keeping her pants up.

Today was a bad day for the home team. The weather was supposed to be great for the next week, but sometime this morning, it changed. These isolated showers moved in around noon and then it was on and off again rain until night. I ended up buying a ton of 100 ft. rolls of plastic, since there is nothing on the roof deck itself. Tomorrow I’m going to put down felt over the whole thing. It doesn’t do anything for a rubber roof, but it is cheap insurance against these freaky fall weather changes. It’s supposed to be nice until next Tuesday. Have a deadline then. It’s going to get ugly. It is already ugly. I got up this morning at what I thought was 5:50. I wanted to be working at first light. Turns out it was only 4:50. This daylight savings thing sucks big time. For roofing and riding. So, just another 7 days. We’ll see if I hold up.