Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Bikes for Death podcast. As always, my name is Patrick,

and I'm your host. And welcome to what I think is a special edition of the Bikes for Death podcast.

If you listen to last week's episode, you might have heard that I put a call out to anybody

who is currently racing the Tour Divide to contact me and set up a time to chat.

There were a few different people that I've been chatting with, but, you know, it's difficult

to line this up with schedules. Obviously, their priority is to be out there pushing themselves,

racing their bikes, and probably the last thing anybody wants to do,

or most of the people want to do, is take a few minutes to record a little podcast with me.

But, you know, so often we get reports of the race after the fact, but I thought it would be

really neat, especially with the Tour

Divide since it's such a long race, I was like, certainly there's got to be someone out there

who's going to have some downtime that wants to chat and kind of give us a play-by-play

and let us know, you know, what it's like, what it's like to be out there right now on the Tour Divide.

And I got to give a huge shout out and a thanks to my new friend, Nick Marzano.

He was incredible in just working through the scheduling and making this all come together.

It took us a few days to where our schedules could align, but he was just really

awesome and willing to make that happen. And so just last night, I was able to catch up with Nick

as he was hanging out in Pinedale, Wyoming. He had a little bit of a short day, and we're going to

talk about why that is in today's

episode. But it worked out that we were able to chat and we were able to get a live report from

Nick. When we chatted, he was 1,250 miles into the race, which is dang near right at halfway.

And at that time, he was in about 24th place on the Tour Divide.

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