Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Bikes for Death podcast.

As always, my name is Patrick, and I am your host.

And today is Wednesday, September 30th, which means we are two days away from the start of my first ever event like this.

We're coming up on the East Texas Showdown and Slowdown, which is going to start at the

Bullet Grill in point blank Texas and take the participants through Sam Houston National Forest

and Davy Crockett National Forest. They'll be seeing a lot of lob lollipine trees and a lot of remote

back roads in Texas. So far we have 52 people

completely signed up, registered, and ready to go. We probably have some more Scraglers come in

pretty soon. And track leaders is live. So this is happening. is happening i like you am feeling probably anxious

and nervous and excited for different reasons but of course i want this to go well and uh really hoping for a

good event right now it looks like we could get a little bit of rain, but it's not looking like anything too crazy.

So ideally, we're just going to mostly get the lower temperatures, which is the main thing.

So the final stats for the showdown route are 380 miles, which is 611 kilometers, with 15,900 feet of elevation.

And the slowdown route is 280 miles with 11,528 feet of climbing.

And 280 miles is 450 kilometers. So on today's episode, I've brought in Matt Fitzgerald,

who is the author of a book called How Bad You Want It. He is an athlete himself. He's written over

20 books, most of them on endurance sports or the psychology of endurance sports, eating for

under, like he really specializes in endurance athletes and endurance sports and a lot of aspects

of endurance sports.

So he is a wealth of knowledge.

But I wanted to bring him on specifically for today's episode

because his book, How Bad Do You Want It, is the book that I read when I was training

...