Yesterday morning, Bill and I headed over to Lawrence to our annual school visit at Woodlawn Elementary School.  Matt Gilhousen, founder and owner of our sponsor, TradeWind Energy, has done arranged this the past three years.  Matt lives in North Lawrence and is very supportive of his neighborhood.

We’ve given the all the kids helmets and lights before.  This year, Matt bought 21 bikes Specialized children bikes for kids that didn’t have them.  Pretty cool.

The kids are great.  The question/answer period could go on forever.  It is about half the time a question, the other half a statement.  I thought the best was “Could you go to my house and tell my dad to wear his helmet when he rides his bike?”

One kid asked about how much our bike cost.  It is nearly embarrassing for me to delve into that subject with the adults, teachers and parents there.  Telling these kids that our bikes would cost over 10K doesn’t sit well with me.  I backtracked and said that you could get a bike to compete for less than $1000, which still seemed outrageous when talking to a bunch of elementary school kids.  Maybe I’m just out of touch with costs.

This year some of the parents made a little obstacle course.  It was pretty challenging.  The rain held off, but everything was wet.  The obstacle course had some plywood teeter-totters, which seemed sketchy, but the kids weren’t fazed.

It was a good change of pace.  Tucker came and I took him for a little run in the neighborhood.  He was super excited and took off.  When we went by Matt’s house, he did a 90 degree turn and ran to his back porch.  He’d been there once, for a party, when he was 9 weeks old.  I don’t get how he remembered that.  He went there in an automobile and never wandered around his lawn.  Dogs.

I’m going to pack up and head west to Lake Wilson , which is in Central Kansas.  It is a little over 2 hours away.  I’m hoping not to get too spooked pre-riding tomorrow’s MTB race course.  It is super technical in a few places.  I am probably going to just get off and walk the technical sections.  Not that I’m that scared, it will just be faster doing it that way.  More predictable.  It just depends how the race is going deciding when to walk and when to try to ride.

It has been in the 60’s here, and tomorrow it is supposed to be in the mid 80’s and windy.  It could be worse, but racing off-road is always much hotter than on the road.  I don’t think anyone is used to those temperatures, so it shouldn’t change the results much.

Okay, once again, I need to get going to pack.

The guys talking to the kids.

Matt with a couple of the kids that got new bikes.

Tucker was beat after his full day.