The short answer is this:  I don’t know.  That’s the first thing that comes to mind a month after my personal best on a bike.  It was definitely a peak life experience.  But it sometimes seems like I imagined the whole thing.  I mean, who does that distance in a car or motorcycle on an average weekend, much less on a friggin’ bicycle?  There was wind, heat, hills on day one, and wind, cold, rain, and hills on day two — repeat riders say it was the hardest in a decade.  There were 9,000 other people out there (I never claimed to be special.)  Yet there are GPS maps proving I did it, and well, Strava doesn’t lie.  So when I think back to the entire experience – the rolling community of all kinds of people with all kinds of bodies on all kinds of bikes, the lush, rolling, green countryside, and of course, the sweaty, serene and sometimes serious suffering – it seems surreal.  But I definitely, most certainly, indubitably did it.  I have witnesses.  Here’s how I did it.  And many of you can too.

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