Time

It was 23 years ago yesterday that I started my current job. Did I think I would be here this long? Who knows? I may have thought that about other jobs that didn’t last that long.

But the time has come today. Cycle America 2022, possibly the last iteration of this great coast-to-coast ride, starts in 9½ weeks. At my age, it’s time to start training in earnest. Training takes time, and is not compatible with working 40 hours/week (says the guy who did just that 4 years ago and is doing it again right now).

So today I tell the world (or at least the tiny corner of the world that reads this blog), that I am retiring. And on Father’s Day (also Juneteenth) I will once again (in a time-honored ritual) dip my rear tire into the Pacific Ocean and embark on a 9 week adventure, riding more than 4000 miles to dip my front tire into the Atlantic Ocean. In my own ritual, I will scoop up a vial of the Pacific, seal it with wax, and break the seal 9 weeks later to merge it with the Atlantic.

I did this 4 years ago, thinking it was a once in a lifetime thing. Little did I know. I will be 70 soon. If I live to beat Robert Marchand‘s age group Hour Record, I’ll have to stick around for a long time – longer than I spent at this job. I’ll probably have to start working again to be able to afford to live that long. But right now, I’m done with working.

I invite you to follow me (again, if you followed me four years ago). I plan to return to daily posts. Or maybe there will be days that I just want to go out for a post-ride beer and skip a day. I can do what I want. I’m retired. (That sounds weird.) While the route will be the same, the experience won’t be. You can read each post and, if you have time on your hands, go back and read the same day’s post from four years ago. The dates won’t match, but the days of the week will. In 2018 we started on Sunday, June 17. This time we’ll start on Sunday, June 19. You can probably figure out the math from there.

The WordPress algorithm provides links to two other posts each day that it thinks are thematically related. Yesterday’s post linked to this. Rereading it, I don’t know how anyone could think I’d still be working come June. It foreshadowed this announcement just a bit.

While I believe in retiring early and often, this was the longest I have ever been at one job. That’s why my leaving gets two posts. I wrote them at different times, not realizing when I wrote the second that I’d already done this once. There will probably be a third on my last day. Maybe the fact that I wrote two different posts to say the same thing in different ways is a sign that I’m getting old.