Changes...

If you happened over to the Bike Works Website over the holidays and clicked on EVENTS & NEWS you might have seen this:

Kent Peterson to train full time- Bike Works looking for Shop Manager to fill his shoes

Bike Works much beloved shop manager and bicycle celebrity, Kent Peterson is going to leave his full time position at Bike Works in early March to train full time for this summer’s Tour Divide; an epic self-supported mountain bike race along the great divide from Canada to New Mexico. The route is over 2700 miles of off pavement racing, and Kent returns to the race to reclaim the single speed record he set in 2005: 22 days! Kent will still be a big part of the family here, but we are beginning a search for a new Shop Manager. The job announcement is here.

While the tone of this announcement is a bit to gee-whizzy for my taste (Jake, our enthusiastic Executive Director, had something to do with that) but it's true, I'm stepping down as the Shop Manager at Bike Works. Rather than try to patch somebody in temporarily while I'm gone in the month of June, we figured that a better plan would be to start looking for somebody now to step into that role full-time in March. So if you or somebody you know would like to work at one of the coolest places on earth and you have what it takes to manage a bike shop, click the link above and read through the job announcement.

While I am going to be ramping up my training in March and yeah, I'm spending the month of June racing the Divide, Jake glossed over a couple of details in terms of my future. First off, it will take a lot of prep, a ton of luck and something of a miracle for this old guy to crack Chris Plesko's amazing 19:00:21 record for the 2741 mile course. My old record of 22 days and change was for the 2500 mile border to border route. Jake makes it sound like I'm just going to ride up and take the record back. I'm going to ride like heck (at a persistent, old turtle pace) to see if I can do it, but it's by no means a forgone conclusion. I'm racing to find out if I can do it.

Second, I could see where folks reading the Bike Works announcement might think, "hey Kent must be rich if he can afford to take that much time off to train." Actually, no, that's not the case at all. What is the case is that Bike Works was and is more than a full time job, one of those jobs that you love but that can easily suck up way more than forty hours a week. And when you add on the fact that I pile on 3 hours per day in bike commuting, which is sort of training but not the mountain riding I really need to do, it makes for some damn long days. So I decided to make a change to let me do more real mountain training.

I do need to earn money. Not a lot, I live pretty simply, but I need to earn a living. I've got a few sponsors like Redline and Ergon helping me out with gear and all you blog readers buying stuff on Amazon and sending donations help out, but the simple fact is that like pretty much everybody else in this world, I work. I mostly make my living fixing and selling bikes. And starting in March, I'll be doing that at a shop that is four blocks from my place in Issaquah.

Yep, The Bicycle Center, which has been in Issaquah even longer than I have, is expanding. They are moving into half of the old Allen Furniture store right next door to their current location on Front Street. The other half the building will be the new location for Amante Pizza and Pasta. Starting in March, when I'm not on the trails, I'll be working at the Bicycle Center. My new commute is so short I'll walk to work.

But I'll get my miles in. I live at the base of the Cascades and now I'll have time in the mornings and/or evenings to hit the trails that are right out my back door. I'll still be doing the bigger adventures on my days off and in June I'll head up to Banff and then south along the Rockies. Of course, the stories and the pictures will show up here.

Keep 'em rolling,

Kent