Cheryl Knowlton: Hi everybody. Cheryl Knowlton with Dynamite Productions here with my favorite sidekick, Clay Johnson from Castle & Cooke Mortgage. This is day two of our, you got to prepare, you got to, you got to be in it to win it, right?
Clay Johnson: Yes, yes.
Cheryl Knowlton: So you’ve got to plan to prepare and prepare to plan, and all the good things.
Clay Johnson: Yeah.
Cheryl Knowlton: Yeah.
Clay Johnson: Which with our lifestyles can be kind of challenging.
Cheryl Knowlton: It can be, but you did it anyway. You did the hardest road biking event in North America, if not the world.
Clay Johnson: It’s the longest single-day event. Yes.
Cheryl Knowlton: The LoToJa.
Clay Johnson: Logan to Jackson. They call LoToJa for short. And it was a beast. And the first year I did it, I got into it because I have friends, a dear friend’s wife was passing away from cancer, which she did pass away. I wanted to support him and I’d never thought I’d be a road cyclist. I’ve mountain biked a lot, as you know. But I thought road cycling, all right. So we did it. We started preparing. I literally had about just under four months of prep time, which is crazy for LoToJa. But-
Cheryl Knowlton: Did you hear that? Four months. We’re not talking four days. You don’t wake up and say, “Oh, I think I’ll do that next weekend.”
Clay Johnson: And that’s a short amount of time getting ready for LoToJa. But I worked hard. I really worked hard. I was getting up extra early, doing some big rides and it paid off on the day of the event. Now I was nervous. I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never done a ride even close to that ride, the closest was 75 miles in preparation for it. But I learned that during the process of doing something really hard like that also, you learn a lot about yourself.
Cheryl Knowlton: You certainly do, which is where we’re going with this.
Clay Johnson: You learn that you can do more. When people say, I can do it, you can do more than you think you can. There were times in the event, I didn’t know how I was continuing to peddle up these long climbs and I thought, my legs are numb. I don’t feel anything, but yet my legs continued to move because mentally I refused to give up. And I think that’s just how it is. And there was a great team, and both times, I’ve done it twice now, both situations, you had a great team you were working with, you were pulling each other. You hit second, third, fourth, fifth winds, not just a second wind. And at one point, one will be struggling to pull it out.
Cheryl Knowlton: Kind of lagging behind a little bit?
Clay Johnson: Kind of lagging behind. Well, then you let them drop behind you, pull them along. And I learned a lot about teamwork. Man, you bond in these trials and these challenging times with these guys that you’re doing these rides with. And it’s amazing. So I guess my moral to the story is prepare well, prepare in advance, and then realize you’ve done what it takes and you have that mental grit to see the job through no matter what.
Cheryl Knowlton: Oh, it sounds like a great metaphor for real estate. Okay, stay tuned for our next episode where we will even tell you more.