Yes, yes, yes. That is the truth and unfortunately (or disastrously) ppl choose their path through their ego-petting, rather than riding with a grain of salt sweat between their lips. I have given up, I even have daily doubts of competing in the 360, because even if we finish, nobody will care, those who already know of me, have deleted me on FB, the trickle down is enormous, Arden, Tim Travis, even others follow suit, I have no contact with them, plus they use blocks to have discussions outside me, or Tim Travis uses aliases to spy in Cycling in Korea, etc...he told me off there a month ago, I googled his alias name and found the importer pseudo name, I called him a sociopath, he called me a homo, well, finally I had to request G (once a friend associated to me, now wearing his HRR jersey and running the show in Cycling in Korea, he bitched me out then finally deleted the posts, which upset my elder sister who used to enjoy keeping tabs on my cycling here through the groups postings, not anymore. The confrontation probably was intended to get me to drop the group admin, I had already had enough already, G had added all the admins, their groups came in, the rest of us eclipsed. No use at all.
Well, I will think it over and over, Chris seems keen, Tim Copeland is our other member training a bit...others dropped out, you can ride legitimately with us, we have room for 5. Chris is ready to finish the 360, he's a stronger rider than me on his own, Tim is training again so I hope his many experiences in road touring help him, we have one other rider joining us this weekend for an icebreaker ride together. I will be content on finishing, there must be 3 to get recognition, otherwise, we are disqualified completely, it;s the Randonneur way, all in, or try again.
Good news, I am planning the HimalayasX2012, my second expedition across western China, more deserts and extreme ahead, so I don't need to damage my knees for this 360, why not just ride and see where we end up? After 200km on road bikes, we'll be naturally high, I experienced this last fall, it was crazy more intense than most of my daily expedition in China, and took weeks to recover too, I couldn't straighten my legs for about a week.