Double-Duty

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!

 There was a time on the blog here when I was doing "double-duty" as an onsite festival reporter AND preparing to unleash the ultra-distance gravel event called Trans Iowa within weeks of each other

Yeah.....that wasn't very smart of me to do. But, I lived through it all, and somehow I was successful. Obviously big props have to go to my volunteers for Trans Iowa at the time and to my co-director in those days, David Pals.

Hammer Nutrition for Trans Iowa v10

Late March and early April was the time I had a lot of things coming to a point. Getting sponsored items in for the event was one of the biggies.

This wasn't told on the blog here, but stacks of products and prizing usually took up plenty of space in the Guitar Ted Headquarters during early April. It was not very fun for the rest of the family who had to work around the inconveniences Trans Iowa put upon them. This only added to my stress in putting on this event, but ya know..... I did what I had to do!

The other part of all this was preparing the odds and ends many do not think about. Things like pens. Clipboards and tape. Making sure the truck was ready. Number plates. pipe cleaners, zip ties, and paper clips. Markers. Maps.

I had a checklist and I was constantly going over it. But again, not much about this was ever written up here at the time. But on top of all this, for three years in a row, I went to cover Sea Otter for "Twentynine Inches", the website I was contributing to at the time from 2007 - 2009 when I attended Sea Otter for the final time. After this time I was the sole proprietor of the site and I decided not to go, as I had a California based contributor who covered the event for me.

An extra windy day at Sea Otter in 2008

I was happy to have been able to go to Sea Otter for those three years. However; travel time and all the missed opportunities for being with my family and taking care of Trans Iowa business really made Sea Otter a pain for me. The experiences in the Monterrey area will be a highlight, for sure, but having Sea Otter right before Trans Iowa was really, really hard. In fact, I pushed the date for Trans Iowa v5 into the first week of May because of my previous two years of dealing with one week of separation between the two events.

Leaving Sea Otter in 2009. This was the last thing I saw at the venue on that day.

 Like the image above, my time at Sea Otter is a misty haze of memories. I'll likely never go back there again, and I am fine with this thought. I do also know I never made any effort to go back, mostly because of Trans Iowa, and because of this reason, I just got used to not having to be there with "boots on the ground" to cover any news coming from this show.

Of course, having my previously mentioned friend, Grannygear, there who was more than happy to go every year to cover news and send images was a huge help. However; even without the help, I wasn't planing on going there again as long as Trans Iowa was around.

But for three years, I was there and for many years afterward, Sea Otter news figured heavily in this blog's writings. And it probably still will as long as Sea Otter continues to be the place where cycling brands and marketers release information and new products.