Click here for the why’s of why these 3 charities.
Pledge me at MS Society of Canada (Official Event Charity)
Pledge me at Team in Training / Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (says Wilson 100 event)
Jewish Family & Career Services – select Counseling Fund in Tribute Fund list
This page can help you use your phone to follow me on Twitter during the event.
I do plan on recruiting some people to post updates on my behalf while I skate.
My twitter account is @MeSk8ULongTime so if you tweet, follow me! Join my paceline! (A skating term.)
I was under the impression from watching an episode of Martha Stewart last week that you could sign up and follow me in one stroke. But I can’t find instructions on how to do that. If someone else knows, pass them on to me. NOW!
One thing I had been told about this event: it always rains at some point!
August is Montreal’s wettest month by a hair. And I have been watching the 10 day forecast for 2 weeks now. Rain rain rain.
But then it started showing the days in question, and finally forecast no rain on either day! And then it got even better, a little cool front to drop the temps by about 10 degrees, so that it will be about 6 degrees cooler than their average for this time of year.
Latest forecast as of 2 days out is for about 62F average for the duration, high of 75, low of 52. Could not ask for better weather. From heaven!
This was a sort of difficult thing to come to terms with. But I have.
There was another 24 hour event years ago that began Saturday morning. I didn’t try to do that because it meant giving up too much of Shabbat.
But my normal Shabbat observance starts out with Services and Dinner Friday night. If I go to bed on time, it continues with Torah Study at The Temple at 9AM, followed by morning services there.
Then I get home around 1pm, and from then until about an hour before sunset, I try to get some playing in in Piedmont Park next to my condo. Tennis (no paying, I am an annual member there), or skating, or anything I can motivate myself to do. In football season, it is the elliptical machine while I watch the Miami Hurricanes.
Then I am usually late getting to Shearith Israel for Mincha (afternoon service),
Seudah Shlishit (3rd Meal), Maariv (evening service) and Havdalah (end of the Sabbath).
So compared to my usual Shabbat, as long as I am able to get to Chabad for services Saturday morning in Montreal, this won’t be much different until that final hour of daylight.
The Montreal Inline 24 is mostly a team event, with Recreation, Fitness, and Elite divisions of teams up to 10 skaters.
But a couple dozen hardy folks try it as solo skaters each year, and this year they added a duo division. I don’t get that one! THAT’s crazy.
The winner the last 2 years is also (according to Atlantan and former world record holder Uwe Brockmann) the current world record holder at around 335 miles. But the world record rules are No Drafting behind other skaters, so it is a completely solo effort. And this event allows drafting. So he has tallied 360 miles each of the last 2 years. Last year, only one of the 15 other skaters managed 300 miles. The year before, 4 of the 25 other skaters did.
So yes, 300 miles is certainly achievable. By me? I think so. These people come from all over Canada and the World to skate this race. But what am I, chopped liver? No, I am coming all the way from Atlanta. Which apparently, is noteworthy enough for the english language version of the CBC radio to want to interview me.
I don’t know if the winner from the last 2 years will be here this year. I kind of hope not. I think his 360 miles is in reach on a good day, but I don’t really feel like “competing” against a person at this point. I’d rather compete against distance instead. And set my sights low, like 300 miles.
I do want to thank all of you for coming to my site and looking around and hopefully donating!
But I also want to thank those who made this day possible, with or without knowing it.
Uwe Brockmann is a legendary Atlanta skater and former 24 hour world record holder for inline skating and A2A champion. In addition to giving me advice and making me aware that there was actually a 24 hour record, Uwe provided additional motivation for me 2 years ago when he saw me doing laps in the park and suggested I wait until I turned 50 to attempt the record for 50 and older instead. That was good enough motivation for me to try A2A2A as a 175-mile intermediate step, as a sort of proof of concept. And Uwe was one of the first people I saw at the finish that day. And he seemed impressed.
Rick Sadlier helped me along outside Taco Mac one night 2 years ago (so he recalls, the details escape me) by suggesting if I wanted a real challenge, to skate to Athens first before turning around to skate back to Atlanta with the race that year. Having it seem like someone else’s idea, and a challenge, made it easier to undertake. I’m not crazy! It was Rick’s idea!
Rob Garner has been our most dependable skater in Atlanta Peachtree Road Rollers for the last 3 years, and 2 years ago he helped me along by insisting on driving to Athens that night while I skated, meeting me 17 miles into it in Stone Mountain. Good thing, too, because I lost my turn sheet around mile 45 when I pulled some food out of my pocket!
Joel Skelton used to be an Atlanta skater and never stops telling me how much better I would be if I actually learned how to skate! But when he found me in Athens that morning 2 years ago, he pledged to stick with me and make sure I skated all the way back to Atlanta with my horrible form. For his efforts, he got a P.R. that day! But I could not have done it as easily without him. And he did finally convince me to ….
…. go to Skate Farm this summer, so thank you, Eddy Matzger, for allowing to take part even though I haven’t been able to pay for it yet! But I hope to do so in September! This Montreal trip just keeps getting expensiver and expensiver.
And thanks to Don Kramer for his logistical assistance as of late in helping me with the trip and with helping me with my volunteer responsibilities in the Jewish community that have taken a back seat lately to my skating and my job. And to Bruce Belden, whose intimidation tactics always give me pause for a while (like when he said I would be crying for my momma by mile 140 two years ago), but who is also there with good teammate advice and tips and whose unwanted Polar HR monitor watch I will be wearing for 300 miles come Saturday.
And thanks to the rest of APRR for keeping it interesting week after week!
Typically when I am skating, it is about 50 calories a mile.
So 300 x 50 is 15,000 calories, which is the calorie content of 4+ pounds of fat.
I know most of you think I don’t have 4 pounds of fat on my body, or at least excess fat. But my body fat scale would beg to differ. Compared to my most fit recent period, I am pushing about 5 lbs. of extra fat around these days.
But I will not be relying on fat for all 15,000 calories or so.
Gatorade powder mix is 200 calories per quart. I will probably do at least 15 quarts during the event, so that is 3,000 calories.
And I will probably eat a dozen or so of some other 200 calorie snacks as well, if I am disciplined about it. Call that 2,000 calories.
So that gets the event deficit down to about 10,000 calories, with this forecast.
That’s less than 3 lbs of fat, and I KNOW I have that much to spare!
Isn’t that what you are really thinking?
Well, I think I can. Have I ever done something similar? Sort of.
Two years ago, October, 2008, on a challenge from a friend, and with the 24 hour ultimate goal in mind, I decided to skate from Atlanta to Athens from 11pm at night to around 6:30am, and then turned around and raced back to Atlanta with the official Athens to Atlanta 87-mile inline skate event, so I covered 175 miles in 14 hours of skating in a 15 hour time period over endless hills (they will wear you down) and often marginal pavement (try skating down Dekalb Ave from Rocky Ford to Moreland after 170 miles!)
Compared to that, 300 miles on the pristine asphalt of a mostly flat Formula One race track loop should be a breeze. And average temps of about 62F over the 24 hour period will not hamper me! (Especially while it will be 25 hotter on average here in Hotlanta.)
My plan is simple. Wear my hear rate monitor. Keep the heart rate in the fat-burning zone, below 70% of max range (my average in my 175 mile skate was 71%). And drink lots of Gatorade, about a quart an hour.
Honestly, part of me wanted to do this 24 Hour thing JUST SO I could acquire this domain name and have it really mean something.
For those of you who don’t get the cultural reference here, the original line is from the Viet Nam movie Full Metal Jacket and is from a scene where a street prostitute is propositioning a couple of G.I.s, saying: Me so horny. Me love you long time.
But it didn’t end there. Rap group 2 Live Crew sampled it for their song Me So Horny (explicit lyrics) and it hit the cultural mainstream from there.
It ended there. Sort of. In 40 Year Old Virgin, Steve Carell revived it in four seconds.
So yes, Me Skate You Long Time. Cause Oh, me so roll-y.
Oh, Me so Roll-y. Oh, Me so Roll-y. Oh, Me so Roll-y. Me Skate You Long Time! For 3 charities, please donate!
So I am raising money for 3 different charities during this event.
I figure with 3 charities, YOU get to choose something worthy that speaks to you.
The event organizers selected MS Society of Canada as their official charity. I have donated in the past to MS, as have many of you. A good friend and really cool person, Falynn, began fund raising for MS since her mother has the illness. And it is pretty bad to look at your parent and wonder if that is also your future. But they are making progress and I saw a cool article about it a few weeks ago … can’t remember where … but …Pledge me at MS Society of Canada (Official Event Charity)
I am also raising money for Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. My friend Jill Powers has been battling this for several years now, and I read each F.U. Lumps blog post from her (she is currently in Houston for the late Summer/Fall 2010 getting treatment) with hope that she beats it one day soon, once and for all. So in her honor, Pledge me at Team in Training / Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (says Wilson 100 event)
And finally, since you think I am nuts for trying to skate 300 miles in 24 hours, why not put your money where your mouths are and donate to the Counseling Fund at Jewish Family & Career Services? They provide low cost mental health counseling services to people from all over Atlanta and all walks of life. I know several people who have been helped by them. But it takes MONEY. So sponsor me with a donation to the Jewish Family & Career Services – select Counseling Fund in Tribute Fund list and help make a difference.
Mental issues are so tough, and often a catch-22. They can cost you your job, which costs you your insurance, which costs you your ability to afford good health care. If you have ever sat at a funeral and said goodbye to 35 years of amazing life experiences and knowledge, and wondered if it could have turned out differently, please donate to this cause!
