The Lost Dot 101 Starts Today!

It’s just before 8 AM in the morning of the lost 101. Sunday, May 10, 2026. For the past few days well prepping and traveling here. I’ve been trying to decide how seriously I’m going to take this race and it’s actually been really hard to like settle on how I feel about it.

Since I’ve retired from road racing, I’ve been trying to do my absolute best to be honest with myself about my wants and needs so with that in mind, I have decided to ask myself the following questions to finally figure out how to approach this event.

Do I think I can win? Yes.

Do I want to win? Yes, I enjoy the feeling of winning.

Am I willing to do what it will take to win? No. I made that decision in how I trained for this race.

Do I think I’ll finish? Who even knows. Anything can happen. I could feel great. I could feel terrible. I could have a non-fixable issue or everything can go smoothly. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Am I still delusional enough to think a win can happen? You betcha! My delulu is one of my greatest motivators and I love that about me.

Will keeps reminding me that it’s just riding my bike and I’m really good at that and so this is very doable. And while he does have a history of giving me more credit than I often deserve (in my opinion), he’s probably right.

Grandma was similarly very excited. I tried to explain the lost dot 101 to her, and I think she understands what I’m doing. But the thing about grandma is that it doesn’t matter what I’m doing. She’s always going to think I can do it and she’s always going to tell me that she’s proud of me and that she loves me more than anything. So what I’m saying is that grandma is in fact, responsible for my insane amounts of delusion, but it has lead me to accomplishing so many seemingly impossible things in my life already. Who am I to not embrace this gift of gall and audacity?

Maybe if I miraculously love this experience and decide to do it again, I’ll consider actively racing for a win. But I think this time I wanna enjoy it. I’ve met so many other participants who are just here to see what they can do. To try something new. To push themselves a little or a lot. And I know that sometimes I struggle with the idea of that being enough.

It’s totally enough. It’s actually really enjoyable. I have never been a fan of cycling suffer culture. But unfortunately, there are copious amounts of suffering required to be a professional bike racer. But I’m retired now and I get to decide how much and how little I suffer. I mostly choose to suffer very little, but then I sign up for hard things like this. What can I say? I hold multitudes!

This is gonna be hard already. I don’t need to make it harder. This event is a privilege. I am privileged enough to have the health, resources, and equipment to do this. I have the privilege of riding my bike through Spain and Portugal for the next 5 to 6 days and the only thing I need to do is keep moving forward (and eating and hydrating and resting as needed).

Even on the journey to get here, I’ve already met so many incredibly interesting people walking the Camino de Santiago, which is insane to me. These people have been walking for weeks. From where I stopped halfway between Girona and here, they still had weeks left to walk here to Santiago. Crazy.

I have a friend who’s trying to convince me to walk the Camino. Good luck with that! Your girl don’t like walking. Walking FOR WEEKS?!

I told her I only envision having to do that in the event of an apocalypse. But I have a few years to think about it so who knows? I’m getting soft in my old age.

So back to the lost dot. I’m excited. I’m excited to ride my bike. I’m excited to meet new people. I’m excited to maybe stumble across some delicious food.

If im being honest, I don’t know that I’ve ever done something that has felt more like it was made and designed specifically for white people. (Except that one time I consented to “contact yoga” at a thanksgiving dinner in Portland…)

I’m not excited about the rain, but I’ve got a plan. I’m not excited to be smelly, but I’ve got a plan and of course my period is supposed to start any minute now and historically it usually starts the minute. I need to do something hard so I’m expecting it around 5:59 PM today since the race starts at six.

If you wanna see how I’m going, you can follow my dot. Will see if I have the energy and cell phone service to post anything while I’m doing the event but seeing how addicted I am to my phone. I will probably make a way.

Please send me words of encouragement, emails, voice notes, a little “you can do it”. They all go along way.

Oh my God, I’m doing this!