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

and I'm your host. And on today's episode, we have me and Ariel who are taking on the Central

Texas Showdown route, which is 475 miles, obviously, in Central Texas. And it's a new route that is part of the Texas Showdown series presented by Bikes for

Death.

I scouted the Central Texas route a while ago via the car and now it was time to ride the damn

thing.

And the last time that I did in ITT was on the East Texas Showdown route at the end of last year.

My editor, Ben Crannell, joined me, but aside from the start and finish line, we never saw

each other during the ride. And that experience taught me how much different it is between an ITT and a group start.

And I still wanted to do an ITT of the Central Texas Showdown, but this time I wanted to invite

some people. So invitations went out, but my friend Ariel was the only person to accept. I have to admit, I'm not surprised.

Texas, like much of the country, has been under a heat wave with much of the state experiencing

100 or more days of 100 plus heat. And the heat was a big concern for us, leading up to this ITT. And at one point we were

even considering starting in the evening and riding through the night and then, you know,

possibly sleeping during the day and then riding through the night again. But about seven to

10 days before we were to set out on our ITT.

The weather started to cool down slightly,

and they were predicting highs in the upper 80s

and lower 90s during the time of our ITT,

which was obviously still hot, but maybe more manageable

than the 110 plus days

that we had been experiencing just prior to that.

...