2. Time ?  My first idea was to start around 10:00 PM so I'd get rid of the darkness when I was still fresh.  I wanted to do highway riding at night, preferably 4-lanes only.  That would mean starting with the Fredericton - Halifax - Fredericton leg.  Then came the following reasoning.  If I leave at 10:00, wake up at 9:00 PM, I'd like at least 5 or 6 hours of sleep before.  What are my chances of having quality sleep between 4 and 9 PM ?  Not likely.  More likely, I'd start my trip already tired.  No, let's wake up at a regular time, start the trip around 7:00 AM and finish the trip around the same time the following morning.  If I do it near the summer solstice, it starts getting light out around 5:00 AM, so the last 2 hours of the trip would be around dawn.  June 22nd sounds nice... 

Further thinking brought me to realize that if I do the Fredericton - Lac-St-Jean - Fredericton leg first, I'd have the sun in my back going in the morning, then in my back again when I came back in the evening.  Nice.

3. The bike :  As I discovered during the SaddleSore, my bike, a Kawasaki ZX-12R is an okay bike for touring but the range sucks big time.  I ran out of gas 3 times last summer and it wasn't always because of carelessness.  Over the winter months I made several modifications to transform the beast into a mile-gobbler.  Subscribing to the LDRider mailing list gave me several ideas.  Here's the list of mods;

    

   1. Fuel Cell (click here for details)
   2. Saddlebags (Joe Rocket).  They are filled with stuff like a tire repair kit, air pump, expanded took kit, chain lube, winter gloves, tie-wraps, rainsuit, long johns, camera, cell phone, spare headlight bulbs, duct tape, electrical tape, etc...
   3. Corbin seat (added after the picture below was taken)
   4. ThrottleMeister
   5. GPS (Garmin GPS V) sitting atop the windscreen
   6. Electric Vest (Widder)
   7. 100 / 55 W headlights

   

   Before the BBG attempt I've had the chance to ride about 7 000 km to iron out all the bugs from my setup.  I'm confident that the bike will hold its own for the course of the ride.  The tank range with the fuel cell is now a healthy 550 km or so.

    

4. The Body and Mind :  Okay, the bike's ready.  How do I get prepared for this ?  I'm not too concerned about staying awake for the ride.  It's only 24 hours and I've been awake for more than 24 hours in a row quite a few times.  What concerns me more is being able to stay sharp for that long on a sometimes monotonous route.  I figured that if I'm in good physical shape, my stamina should improve.  While I wasn't completely out of shape, it had been several years since I'd participated in regular physical activity.  My wife and I wanted to get in shape anyways, so we decided to start running last summer.  This was perfect, running would help me shed a few pounds and I later discovered that you can get into the same mindset when you are running as when you are motorcycling, sort of phase out and focus on the job at hand... 

One small problem is that I've always hated running and figured I would need a very specific goal in order to stick with the plan.  After some discussion, we decided to try to train for a marathon (Fredericton has one in May, so we had 10 months to go from scratch).   Found a running schedule on the internet and followed it, beginning with baby steps, 2 to 3 km at first then building up from there.  Discovered that I now really enjoy running.  We did the marathon on May 5th and finished it together.  It was one of the most physically difficult things I ever did but at least I can finally cross out 'run a marathon' from the list of things to do in my life.

For the SaddleSore I was wearing my trusty old leather suit.  As with much of my wardrobe, it had started shrinking gradually over the 10 years of ownership.  It was also badly scarred from a few get-offs on the track (racing my ever-prestigious YSR 80, yeah I race motorcycles baby, yeah ...)  It needed replacing.   Textiles would be the way to go and initially Aerostitch seemed like the winner... until I saw the price.  Eventually settled on a Technic Hurricane jacket and some Angora pants.  Waterproof, vented and have removable liners. 

During the SaddleSore, hydration was a factor.  It was one of those very hot days and I was carrying 1.5 liters of water in my seatpack.  I would drink only when stopped and I found it to be quite time consuming.  When you're stopped you have other stuff to do (buy gas, eat a bite, go pee).  A bit later I purchased a Camel Back hydration system and used it fairly often last summer.  It works really well but the only problem is that while I now have 'water on demand', I find myself drinking a lot more than I need to, sometimes just to relieve the boredom.  The side effect of this is that I have to stop to urinate much more frequently than usual.  Lately I've started just drinking 15 to 20 minutes before a scheduled stop and this is working out okay.

I've been toying with the idea of getting a Texas catheter, which is basically a condom with some tubing at the end of this that one could have run down their leg to relieve themselves whilst on the road.  In the end I decided against this mainly because I'm not comfortable enough trusting a condom to stay in place for 24 hours.  I'd hate to discover in mid-pee that it isn't there anymore :-)  Instead I'll just try to drink intelligently.  

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