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Life and Sisyphean Certainties

Jon Neely / 01.05.2006

Life’s certainties: I’m going to die. I’m going to pay taxes. I’m going to push a bike up a hill on a cold rainy night for all of eternity. OK, that last one is my own personal Sisyphean certainty. It was a revelation during a moment of profound sleep deprivation at Beast of the East in 2003. I laugh every time I think about it. The absurdity of the thought and the delusional mind that was accepting of that as truth. I laugh about it except during those times when I’m pushing a bike up a hill on a cold rainy night for what seems like an eternity.

Team GOALS ARA paid a visit to the great state of West Virginia this past weekend to participate in Odyssey’s Endorphin Fix. This year’s edition offered up a new location near Canaan Valley, stiff competition, an awesome fixed ropes site and one of the heaviest backpacks I’ve ever lugged around for 30+ hours. This was an excellent tune up for our Primal Quest bound crew (Bruce Wong, Jeremy Kuhlen, Kristen Dieffenbach and myself).

Missing gear was the popular item at the check-in this year. Seemed nearly every team in the race had some of that. Our extra pfd and strobe light went to good use on other teams. We were a couple foot loops shy in our climbing kits so Kristen and I split a set and one-legged up the fixed rope ascent. One piece of gear we all had was a set of DiNotte Bike Lights that we were going to use for the race. DiNotte is one of our product sponsors this year and their Ultra 5 and Ultra 3’s will be lighting the way for us at PQ and other long events. Team GOALS has been testing these lights for a couple months but two nights of riding through rain and fog really proved out their durability. With four lithium or NiMH rechargeable AA’s they put out a ton of LED based light with tremendous burn time. At 210 grams including batteries these lights are an excellent choice in the unsupported racing format.

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