I meant to write something as soon as I returned from LA, where the AIDS/LifeCycle ends, but it's taken me a couple days to recover from what turned out more challenging than just riding a bike seven days in a row to LA.

The day before the ride, registration day, I was getting cold feet. I'd trained enough, and this was my second year so I knew what to expect, but a few weeks before I'd been put on a medication which I reacted badly to and ended up loosing five pounds and got pretty sick before me or my doctor realized what was going on.

Going into this ride I was still a little sick and had lost five pounds in the previous week, but the first day (85 miles from SF to Santa Cruz) didn't even feel like a challenge and Day 2 (105 miles from Santa Cruz to King City) was a lot of fun (this year I stopped at the skinny dipping spot and when my bike computer ticked over to 100 miles got to tell a girl I was riding with she'd just made her ever century.

That night I started to get sick though, waking up several times in the night with a pain in my stomach. I felt uneasy, but went to breakfast just after 5:00am, skipping the eggs and sausage, but a short while later I lost my breakfast in some bushes behind a porta-potty.

I got back to my tent and consulted with the "team doctor" (it's very handy to have an MD camped right next to you) and she said to drink an entire bottle of gatorade and just lie down for an hour. An hour later, still in just as much pain I packed up my gear and the tent and started to cry in a friends arms because I knew I wouldn't make it through the entire day, no matter how determined I was to ride every mile.

I spent most the day in medical, with an IV in my arm, but I'll have to finish the story later.