Yes Victor,

I finished Butterflood but I must have looked like a miserable drowned rat when I checked in at the end with Planet Ultra. I'll never forget Brian Bowling looking up at me from his check-in table and saying (in a sympathetic voice) "Don't worry Rick, you'll feel better about this in the morning."

Yeah, an epic day on the bike.

And no, I had no idea Saralie was that late in starting double centuries; esp. to look at her now! What an excellent Ultra rider she has become!

Rick / OCRR

Yup. I kinda talked her into it. Not that it took that much talking. I think to an ultra-marathoner, riding a mere 200 miles is childsplay.

You can't outrun death. The idea is to make it an ultra marathon and make that bastard work for its win.

Maybe you can't outrun age, but you can sure open up your lead by staying fit. It will run you down eventually, but I like to enjoy being in the lead for as long as possible.

I guess it wouldn't be a good idea to let Death lead and just suck its wheel unitl it got all tired out and then you could just pull out and sprint past? No, probably wouldn't work . . .

Rick / OCRR

Don't take this as snarky, because I know you're a kind person -

But this 40 years since diagnosis diabetic runs marathons and weighs 145 pounds

Diabetes does not mean greed

People have to be educated to the fact that Type 1 diabetes is a genetic auto-immune system disorder, and has nothing to do with lifestyle.

Even Type 2 has a genetic component. My mother ate well and was rail thin her entire adult life, and still developed Type 2 in her 60s. There's a genetic component there, too, and it strikes about half of every generation on my mother's side of the family. My grandmother was never fat, and she was a diabetic. My mom and two of her siblings were, and I am too.

I do know about it, my wife's entire family was wiped out by it, my wife actually knows who to blame for it, because it showed up in one generation, and has continued ever since. The problem is that Type 2 has gone from a fairly rare disease, primarily of those over 50 to a major epidemic, an increase that has come primarily in the last 50 years, as obesity rates have climbed.

There's nothing wrong with the "good for your age" formulation, in my opinion. This week, the world Masters track championships are taking place at the velodrome in Manchester, England. The guys who win the medals in the 60+ age group would be utterly crushed were they to compete against the Olympic champions. They are terrific cyclists, but in the final analysis they are only "good for their age".

None of us can be as good as we could have been had we trained properly thirty years ago. But so what? We can still be the best that we can be.