The place: Church St. Burlington, Vt, The Event: UVM Cycling 24 hr trainer ride...

So the UVM Cycling team had this crazy idea to have a 24 hour trainer ride in order to raise some money to fund a local bike safety clinic for elementary school students with any additional money going to help the club out. A good idea, right? All us socially awkward cyclist have to do is bring a bicycle, hop into a trainer, and spin our legs for awhile and the mostly sedentary population can be amazed and toss us some spare change. If only things were that easy. For the most part, people were very generous and liked the legitimate cause being supported by a bunch of college kids with big quads. But that was before it began to get dark, and colder, and attract a bunch of sketchy fellows who helped us on the first shift (5pm - 10:30pm) pass the time. This included the various people who came by and asked if we had a solar power generator (yes, thats correct solar power) in the trainer to capture all of the power we generated for later use. I suppose thats what you get for living in an area know for the hippie, alternative power loving population. To this we politely replied that, yes, we were generating many watts over our hours of time on the trainers and that they were connected via underground cables that routed to the local shops and kept them lit and heated throughout the winter time. Nice. This wasn't even the beginning. Another activist approached and told tales of woe such as the funding for breast cancer being 30 times as much as prostate cancer and the unfairness of this. As I left from my first shift, an older homeless man had come and began telling his story of being imprisoned by John D. Rockafeller and truly being an alien in human form with his real body being kept by the Rockafellers and the CIA. He also apparently had organs made from cancerous tumors that he crudely fashioned by cutting them and sewing them into the various organs necessary for survival. The us mint is also apparently being run by the CIA and if anyone sees any 1977 coins or bills, you should hold onto it, for they are worth many thousands of dollars due to the fact they were printed by the same Rockafellers and insiders involved in the Watergate scandal. This was also apparently the year that the world's magnetic fields reversed, the planets aligned and water began to flow backwards. Welcome to Burlington, the city of the future. Thankfully I missed the graveyard shift, when many other wonderful people came by for a visit to Chris Warden and Vinnie Scalia, our two guys holding it down for the night. They were smart enough to bring a video camera to capture the craziness. This included a shirtless tibetan sherpa screaming wildly and breaking his cellphone on the ground, sexual advances of an inebriated young woman to a front tire before dropping trow for a little bathroom break in a nearby alleyway, another lady wildly meowing while pounding on a shop window, and the late-night snow plow passing within inches of annihilating our entire tent setup. A Beauty to behold, I'm sure. Makes me glad that I was completely passed out for that entire time. The next day, I returned to do some more trainer riding and fill in any gaps that people didn't show up to ride in. This allowed me another 4 hours on the trainer to people watch and enjoy the company of my fellow UVM compatriots. All in all, it was successful, free coffee was provided by the fine folks of starbucks, many stories have come from the experience, everything went off without a hitch, and a fun time was had by all involved. Can't wait til race season starts.