Following Up

TigerBlog began the week talking about the cross country bike ride that basketball players Maddie Plank and Charlie Bagin are currently undertaking.

He found out some additional information about the two of them, and so he figured he'd share it today. 

First, it turns out that Bagin has been a regular TigerBlog reader. TB has always wondered about that. Do the current athletes read this? He assumes that the overwhelming majority of the readers are alums. 

While he contemplates that, he also wants to let you know a few other things about Bagin and Plank's ride. 

The two of them have their own website for the ride, which you can see HERE. This was sort of a good-news, bad-news situation for TigerBlog, who didn't know it was there. The good news is that they have entries for every day of their trip. The bad news is that TB ended up reading a lot of them because they were so good.

Their latest entry as of yesterday was from Montana, as they ride through the Rockies. This was part of it:

We paid a visit to the local park, which just so happened to have an ice cream stand. Maddie opted to order black licorice and cotton candy, which is almost vomit-inducing if you ask me.

TB has to side with Bagin on this one.  

The entire trip is being documented, and their stories are amazing. This is from two days ago:

We reached one of the coolest stops of the trip in Spotted Horse, a “town” with a population of two. We stopped at the only building in town, the Spotted Horse Bar, and were greeted by a barking dog. Charlie dug into a burger while we sat outside soaking up the sun. When we restarted, Charlie warned me that those 30 miles might be aggravating. He was right; the ride from Spotted Horse to Clearmont might have been my least favorite spurt of riding of the last few weeks. My self-consciousness of being slower than Charlie on the bike in addition to fighting a 30 mile per hour headwind really got to me. It felt like the ride would never end, and when we passed some motels 10 miles from our destination I was eager to call it a night. We kept pedaling, but I felt my knees grinding painfully. A highlight of the ride is that the Big Horn Mountains came into view! Their snow covered peaks definitely made Charlie and I glad we opted to go around rather than over. 

Make sure you check out their blog. It's really, really good. It puts you right into the heart of their trip, and, for someone like TB who is a regular bike rider, it makes him wish he had done something like this 30 or 40 years ago.

For his current bike-riding blog, it would go something like this:
Went to the end of the road. Turned around. Came back. Same as yesterday.

Meanwhile, the big news of the week is of course the announcement from Tuesday that Mollie Marcoux Samaan is leaving Princeton after seven years as the Ford Family Director of Athletics to become the commissioner of the LPGA. TB wrote about Mollie yesterday, and you can read that HERE if you missed it.

TB went back to the day after Mollie had been hired, back in 2014, to see what he wrote about her. It was quite similar to what he said about her yesterday. For instance, there was this:

She spoke with passion in her introductory remarks about all the things that make Princeton and Princeton Athletics so special and about how she's honored to be back to lead those efforts. She smiled and laughed. She talked about the coaches and how much she's looking forward to working with them. She conveyed - oozed - a love of Princeton Athletics, and that's requirement No. 1 for this position. Her energy and charisma were obvious to everyone who had come to meet her, from coaches and athletics staff to student athletes to media members, and it resonated with everyone. 

Wow. That was spot on, wasn't it?