Home time

Well, considering that I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to start the race, 8^th isn’t bad. PO and Steph came out of nowhere at the final stretch and pulled off a second place for Canada. Part of me was a little disappointed that we didn’t beat them in all of the events, but it was good to see Canadians on the podium. Also, I have to say that they made the exact move that I told myself that I was going to do on the first lap, but I played it safe. I have led out the pack sprint one too many times and didn’t want to get burned again. Fortune favors the bold.

I still feel like I want to curl up in a hole and die, but I think that I am going to kill off some of the evil flowing in my system with some cheap Aigle wine :)

Everyone is taking off to head back up the mountain for the last time so I need to sign off. But first, I have to say that I think that being a few pounds lighter and having more experience together riding, Brian and I will be a force to be reckoned with next year and then the next in Beijing. He is truly an amazing athlete keeping up with a lot of guys my age when he is the same age as my father! 10 Ironmans, 3 paralympic games… next year will be good.

Home time...

Well, considering that I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to start the race, 8^th isn’t bad. PO and Steph came out of nowhere at the final stretch and pulled off a second place for Canada. Part of me was a little disappointed that we didn’t beat them in all of the events, but it was good to see Canadians on the podium. Also, I have to say that they made the exact move that I told myself that I was going to do on the first lap, but I played it safe. I have led out the pack sprint one too many times and didn’t want to get burned again. Fortune favors the bold.

I still feel like I want to curl up in a hole and die, but I think that I am going to kill off some of the evil flowing in my system with some cheap Aigle wine :)

Everyone is taking off to head back up the mountain for the last time so I need to sign off. But first, I have to say that I think that being a few pounds lighter and having more experience together riding, Brian and I will be a force to be reckoned with next year and then the next in Beijing. He is truly an amazing athlete keeping up with a lot of guys my age when he is the same age as my father! 10 Ironmans, 3 paralympic games… next year will be good.

let the suffering begin!

Well, I am officially very sick. I am losing more fluid through my nose than I can bring in through my mouth, I have a fever, and I am coughing a lot still. Should be an interesting race today.

Goal for the day, beat the other Canadians for a 5 event sweep. I am not sure that we have a great shot at this since this is the only event that Steph and PO really care about and usually do quite well in, but what the heck.

Shoot me now and put me out of my misery...

Well, the time trial (also known as both mine and Brian’s strongest event) was a total flop. I will take this one on my shoulders. I have been hacking and coughing for the last couple of days and despite my efforts to take in vitamin C and get lots of rest I think that it played a large role in today’s 10^th of 39 result. Although 10^th is a respectable result (the best since 98 I think) I know that we could have made the podium. The program that was laid out by our coach was a perfect taper for this event, my legs felt amazing today! I had lots of power and spring in my step, but my lungs really held me back. After finishing the race, I thought that it went well because my lungs were burning and I felt like I was going to throw up (if you feel like you had something left at the end then you didn’t go hard enough). However, once we spun out for a couple more minutes and got off of the bike, I knew that something was wrong. My legs still felt fresh. Throughout the race, I felt like we should be going faster, but my heart rate was pinned around 192 beats per minute for nearly the whole race (this is pretty typical for me in a short time trial such as this one).

So, I think that I am going to drown my sorrows in vitamin C, cry myself to sleep tonight, and hope that I feel better for the road race.

For those who are curious, we were still the top Canadian team in the race… but not by as much as it should have been (Steph and PO were 12^th and Gene and Craig were 17^th)

Sprinting is not my bag baby...

Got beat out in the pursuit finals last night for various reasons. The primary one being lack of experience. I know that we are stronger and that we will school them next year :)

So, today was supposed to be a day of recovery riding with some strong efforts, but the other two Canadian tandem teams decided to make a late entry into the 200m sprint. We had no intentions of doing the sprint because neither Brian or I like sprints and we are both quite horrible at them. Not to mention the fact that we had never done one together before. But, we couldn’t let the other teams do one and not see how we measure up against them so we borrowed some sprint bars and entered the race :)

Now, one of the hardest parts of the 200m sprint is holding the bike steady while going well over 60km/h through the corners and then sitting down at some point to finish the ride. Normally, the riders will start up on the rail of the track and then dive down to the bottom of the track to use gravity to accelerate the bike. Both riders will also stand up and push as hard as they can for about the first half of the sprint and then sit down together. Now, Brian and I had never done one of these together before, and we got a pretty fast lap in our kilo while sitting down so we thought that we would try a slightly different strategy. Instead of dive bombing down just before the start of the first lap and then struggling to maintain control of the bike, Brian suggested that we dive down a half-lap early and just accelerate through the corner. We were the ONLY team that did this, but it still scored us a 10th place finish and the top Canadian spot :P

New Canadian record - shot at Bronze medal

Final time – 4:34 something for third place in qualification. New Canadian record and a shot at a Bronze medal. Brian told me that no one has gotten a medal at world championships since 98 or something like that. I think that we have a pretty good chance since we had to pass the other team twice in our pursuit and we were up on the next guys by almost a full second.

Finals are this evening at 7:15 local time which equates to around noon in Calgary time. I will keep this post short as my battery is about to die, more info to follow … after the final!

So, today was a rollercoaster of emotions. Before the race, I almost felt physically ill while waiting for the race to come (we were up at 630 when some wankers from Columbia were yapping in the hallways) for over 10 hours! Once we were on the start line, I was feeling pretty good. Then during the race I felt like we lost the race in the first lap. I felt like the start was really bad because we were a little slow to get going and then once we got into the race I was convinced that we were going to be bottom half. My legs felt like they were rubber in the second lap, I wasn’t holding the bike down on the black line, and I felt a piano drop behind me in the 4^th lap. Then, I was elated to find out that we beat the other Canadian team by 4/10ths of a second and were sitting in 6^th place!

Gotta run, but to make a long story short, the last Canadian team crashed and then didn’t beat us in their last run. We finished 7^th in the event that we think is our weakest event.

Boo yeah, can’t wait for the pursuit tomorrow!

Today we didn’t have time booked on the track until 5pm so the team went on a bit of a day trip. First we went to the “Chateau d’Aigle” for a little bit of history and culture in the day (before we went into town for the eating and shopping). It was actually quite interesting to see how it was all laid out and to see how the use of the building evolved with time. There was one room that was used for a prison at one point back around the 13^th century that went though quite a few renovations over the years. When I first went into the room, I was wondering why there were parts of the walls that were plastered over and other parts where there was a lot of graffiti. After reading the signs that were around the room, I realized that there were multiple centuries of layers of graffiti that were revealed in different parts of the room. The oldest layers of graffiti were written in blood from prisoners close to the turn of the millennium and then the newer writings were more along the lines of poetry and artwork. There was also a torture room at the top of one of the towers, but I didn’t get a whole lot of time to look around in there. Apparently there were shackles hanging from the ceiling and I noticed that the floor was covered with some sort of carpet-like material. I think that it was there to cover up many years of dried blood :) Then the rest of the Chateau was mostly for wine making, entertaining and sleeping quarters.

Our times on the track were a little disappointing today, but there were a few contributing factors that slowed us down a fair bit. On a race day, we wouldn’t have even thought about walking around on our legs all day and we would have paid a lot more attention to our nutrition. It wasn’t until we got off of the track that I realized I hadn’t eaten a meal in over 9 hours with only a couple of granola bars and cookies in between. Not a good formula for success. Although, when I say disappointing, I mean that we would have been around the right time to tie the Canadian record. We want to beat it.

OK, I got Brian’s camera hooked up and here are the photos from the last little while.

Here is a picture looking out from just outside of our window... The camera can't capture it fully. plus this picture was taken on a day when the visibility wasn't as great as other days. When I make my millions and I don't need to work anymore, I will definitely retire in a little mountain town :)

One of the other athletes asked me today what my favourite part of the trip was so far and I didn't give an entirely honest answer :P This morning I got my bag full of national team kit so I would say that my favourite part of the trip thus far was throwing on the maple leaf in a foreign country representing Canada. What can I say? I am a bit of a fanatical patriot at heart.


Then, up top is a shot of our speed machine kitted out with the national team front disc wheel. Apparently, there are only a few wheels that most tandem riders will trust on the track. Brian said that he saw a Mavic Io crumple during a match sprint in Athens... ouch! Not only would that have been a front wheel exploding at over 60km/h, but those things run close to 3000US!

I have to say that I am getting more and more excited for these races with the passing of every day. I had some apprehensions about both the new track and the time trial course at first, but the more that I ride both of them, the more confident I get. When we first drove the time trial course, I actually started to feel physically sick at the thought of riding what looked like a winding bike path at 50-60km/h. Then I really started to worry when I saw horses and tractors in amongst the cornfields that we were riding right through the middle of. All of this was preceded by a hairpin turn about 500m into the course and then an uphill hairpin turn another couple of km in! Remember, we are doing this course on tandems! Everyone was in agreement that it was probably the coach’s sick idea of a joke. Once we got out there and rode it a few times, I started to warm up to the course, and once we took a few of the corners at speed I was almost starting to like it. Although it is a pretty technical course, a lot of the corners seemed worse than they really are because it is literally the width of a bike pathway and all of the corners are blind corners. However, the course only goes in one direction, so it will only be a little sketchy when we pass people on the course.

As far as the track is concerned, I am in love! The corners are far smoother, the track surface is rock solid, and most importantly our times are way faster! For those of you who know a thing or two about track times, by the end of our track workout we were holding 12.8 second laps (200m track) steady during our flying kilos at close to pursuit pace. I think that we might have been going a little harder than a pursuit effort, but at the same time, it was at the end of our workout… I guess that we will see on race day. If anyone is interested, the Canadian tandem pursuit record was set in Sydney by Brian (that is the name of my stoker. “Mixmasta Cy” was giving me a hard time about not including any names. I was doing this because I am a little paranoid about throwing information about other people on the web, but I guess that it wouldn’t be too hard to find with a quick google search on our results) and Min … something or other… and the time to beat is 4:35. I think that we have a chance to beat the Canadian record this year, but I guarantee that we will have the record between now and Beijing.

No pictures for a while...

We are now well into day two in Switzerland and everyone is adjusting to the 8 hour time shift (except the Quebeccers that only have a 5 hour time difference). We are staying in a Swiss ski school half way up the side of a mountain at about 1200m elevation (900m above where we will be racing). The view is absolutely breathtaking! Now, you are probably asking “if the view is so great, then why didn’t you post any pictures?” Well, my camera crapped out on me two days before leaving for Switzerland and I didn’t get the extended warranty on it so I am going to have to send it away for a couple of months to get repaired when I get home :( Since we are halfway up the side of the mountain, we have a really intense drive to and from town every day up and down this windy, narrow, mountain road. At many points it narrows down so that there is only room for one car and the places where there is room for two are so tight that the rock faces and retaining walls are covered in scrapes from people cutting just a little too close.

Although the view is breathtaking and the road is fun to come in and out of, we are 4 to a room in smaller rooms than army barracks and everything is continually damp… But, the cold dampness aside, I think that this would be a wonderful place to live. Down in the valley is the town of Aigle, the home of the world cycling centre and UCI headquarters. Also known as the holy grail of cycling. The track is in pristine condition, smooth transitions into the corners, and the fear of falling through one of the unsupported boards in the corners is blissfully absent from your mind while riding! Just to give a little idea as to how much of a difference a good track can make to the times, consider the following. When my stoker was getting ready to go to Athens, the best times that he and his partner could muster at the time in Burnaby were around 5:05 for the 4km pursuit. When they raced in Athens, they pulled off a 4:35! 40 seconds could easily be the spread between first and last place in a single track race. Luckily this track is indoors, so we won’t have opposing winds to affect race times so the strongest team will be the winner.

If there is one thing that I hate, it is to be beaten (or win) in a time trial (or other individual event) on a day where the wind conditions changed drastically from the starting rider to the finishing rider. If I win, then I can’t know for sure that it was just because of favorable winds and if I lose, I wonder whether I could have won if the winds had been equal.

So, the numbers are split down the middle between Anglophone and Francophone on the trip and from the moment that we arrived in the airport, the Francophone crowd chose to stand on the other side of the airport from the Anglophones (we arrived an hour earlier and sat down at some tables while waiting). I’d like to think that it is because of the language barrier since some of them seem to warm up to those who speak French, but nearly all of them speak English quite well. Over the last year, I have become quite fascinated with the attitude of the Quebecois towards the rest of Canada. Between work, cycling, and my time in the military, I think that I have seen a pretty good cross section of Quebeccers… Dangerous territory, perhaps I will save this one for another day when I have time to give careful consideration to my words so as not to horribly offend anyone :P

I hate airlines...

Well, I knew that it was coming, but there is always that little glimmer of hope that the airline won't try to feed it to you up the hoop for transporting your bike on the way to a race. The most depressing part of it all is that sometimes it costs nothing, and other times they want hundreds of dollars. When I went to Chile, they didn't charge us a penny on the way down and then only 75 bucks on the way back. When I went o Brazil, I got charged 150 on the way down and then 350US on the way home. Today, we got charged 175/bike, which seemed like a deal since we talked them down from 350/bike.

But, I should go back to the beginning. We arrived at the airport 3 hours before our departure in anticipation of troubles with the airline. When we got to the front of the check-in line, we had a very friendly and helpful agent. She was going to only charge us a 60 dollar flat rate per bike and she offered us an opportunity to take a later flight (because they oversold our flight) and we could get either 400 euros in travel vouchers or 300 euros in cash! It was too good to be true! Then, reality came back to kick us in the groin when we were told that we couldn't go on the other flight because of our bikes (the other flight had too much cargo or something like that) and the manager of the lady who was trying to help us out came down on her hard and came to tell us that he was going to charge us 350/bike. Then, when I asked him to explain the pricing to me, he tried to brush me off (bad mistake...) but I persisted. He stormed off to some back room and then came back to tell us that we could bring the bikes for a mere 175 dollars a piece... I can't wait to see how much they ask for when we come back. My stoker said that they tried to charge him over 600 euros for his bike one time!

So, then we get to the airport and one of the pieces of luggage didn't arrive. So, we had to wait for the other pilot to fill out the forms for a lost bag etc and went out to the waiting area expecting to see our ride waiting for us. Turns out that even though we got to the waiting area an hour late, our ride still wasn't there to pick us up. I won't go into details, but the transport was supposed to be arranged 2 days before we got there and I am just about to get into the van now that is now 3 hours late... I really need to sleep.

Check out the view!

Today was our last day of the training camp on the track and both my stoker and I were exhausted. We still managed to push out better times that the other team (because we couldn't stand the thought of them getting faster times even if it is just a training camp :P) but by the end of the workout we were both ready to have an afternoon nap. But, instead we had to come back and go for an hour and a half recovery ride to get the lactic acid out of our legs. Although it is a little counter-intuitive, sometimes the best way to recover is to work just a little more. If you just sit around after a hard workout, then there is still a lot of lactic acid lingering around in your muscles that will make you feel sore and stiff the next day. Getting out and doing some light activity stimulates blood flow and flushes the lactic acid out of your muscles and helps your body to start repairing the damage from the previous hard work outs.

Tonight we went to a birthday dinner for my stoker's brother-in-law and DAMN is he a good cook! I find these types of functions to be one of those love-hate relationships. I love eating all of the wonderful food, learning about some new dishes, meeting some new people. But I hate the inevitable overeating and sore belly that ensues. Ahh well, I guess that it isn't so bad when I am getting around 4 hours of training in every day. I love these training camps because it is actually a lot of work to make sure that you eat enough :) If you do the math, a medium workout will burn an average of 1000 calories per hour. That means that when you add on the rest of a normal inactive day, that you need to take in nearly 6000 calories a day just to maintain the same weight. Do you have any idea how much food that is? That is like eating 12 quarter pounders with cheese :P That's right, 3 pounds of beef, 12 slices of cheese and 12 buns!

On that note, I will leave you with the wonderful view from the house that we had dinner at this evening. They have a really cool little patio right on the top of their house that gets this wonderful view. Kinda gets me thinking about what kind of add-on I could put on my house to get an awesome downtown/mountain/COP view... Could get expensive, but would be so worth it!

Quote of the day...

Originally I was having some second thoughts about taking the extra week to be able to participate in this training camp because a lot was happening at work this week. Today proved that I had nothing to worry about and that all of this training is going to pay off big. Things looked a little bleak from hearing what was going on in the office in the first couple of days, but my team pulled together and sorted out the problems that cropped up before the week was through. I should’ve known from the beginning that they would have no problems. As for the training camp, we have seen some incredible gains in a very short period of time. Although the individual skills of a tandem team are very important, putting two strong riders together will not always make a strong team. The team must learn to work together, anticipate the other’s movements, and most of all to trust each other (especially the stoker on the back!).

We have put a lot of time into honing some of the more technical aspects of track racing, such as maintaining a straight and steady line at high speed and doing a standing start. There are two types of starts, a standing start and a flying start. For the standing start, a person (usually a larger individual) stands behind the rider and holds onto his seat or frame and then the rider must start the race without any initial speed. This may not sound overly difficult at first, however you must remember that in track cycling the bike only has one gear and it runs on a fixed up. This means that the rider has to accelerate from 0 to around 55km/h in the same gear!

So, I finally got an itinerary of what the trip to Switzerland is going to look like. Apparently we have almost a week of acclimatization and training where we will be able to ride the track and ride the time trial and road race courses. The time trial course is apparently quite technical and short, neither of which are good for me. I tend to excel in the races where a really high, sustained effort is required because I am good at shutting out the pain and just driving forward. This course will have multiple turns and we will likely end up doing it 3 times meaning several turnarounds in addition to all of the turns on the course. To add to the excitement, they predict that the roads will be muddy and slippery because the locals are in harvest season right now… great. I am going to be playing the clip of Bobby Julich’s Tour de France ending time trial in my head :(

Finally, my quote of the day goes to our coach for the training camp (the guy on the motor bike) “You know what they say… Small headlights Big penis!”

Another successful day at the track. My stoker and I were consistently pushing lap times that would give us a track record at the Burnaby track and possibly put us in the range to get a medal at world championships. Track cycling is very different from road cycling in that there are several events (like in track and field) each lasting from as short as 10-12 seconds to a maximum of around 5 minutes (for individual events). The level of effort and the amount of power required to do this type of event is much greater than in road cycling as you have to accelerate the bike from 0 to upwards of 60km/h (for the kilometer race) and try to figure out how hard you can push for the short distance without your body shutting down on you. The joke that is used a lot at the track is that at the end of a pursuit (4000m for elite men) is that if a person did not pace their race properly it is as if they have a boat anchor that falls out in the last kilometer because they just simply cannot maintain the speeds that they started at. The timing and efforts are so precise that going a couple tenths of a second faster in the early laps can cost 1-2 seconds in later laps (keep in mind that a lap in the pursuit on a 200m track should be around 14 seconds). Although 1-2 seconds doesn’t sound like a lot, track cycling is similar to events like the 100m sprint where the event can be decided in the thousandths of a second. At track provincial championships a couple of weeks ago, I ended up being tied down to the thousandth of a second for first place and had to do another race for first place.

It was also a really good day for us because we solved a lot of mechanical problems. If you read my post yesterday, you would know that I said that tandems have a lot of mechanical problems. As of the start of riding the other day, we had a broken crank, two creaky bottom brackets, a stripped bolt holding the crank on that prevented us from fixing the creaky bottom bracket in the rear, a stripped bolt on the stem holding my stoker’s handlebars on and a couple of other little things as well. By the end of today, all we need to do is pick up a couple of new bottom brackets (turned out they were toast) and put it all back together again.

Everyone has been telling me that the track in Burnaby is probably one of the hardest tracks in the world to ride and that all of our times will definitely be faster in Aigle, Switzerland. Below is a link to the website for the world cycling centre, home of the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) where they actually have a 360 view of the track that we will be riding.

http://www.cmc-aigle.ch/En/

I haven’t managed to find a site where our results with be posted, but I should be able to get that from our coach another day. I found out that there will be 41 tandem teams from around the world competing at this world championships. To give you an idea of the level of cycling, there are probably about a quarter that will be dropped from the peloton early in the race, about a half dozen that will be strong enough to break away and give most top non-disabled riders a good run for their money. We will need to get in the upper third of results in order to keep a spot on the national team next year and we hope to get top 5 or even a medal in the time trial. While in Aigle, we will compete in the one kilometer (the kilo), the pursuit (four kilometers) and a 200m sprint for track events and then a 24km time trial and a 105km road race. Should be fun!

So, after much coaxing from friends, family, coworkers, and the love of my life I have finally started a blog! There have been many reasons that I avoided this for a long time, namely time, but I am also not a big fan of publishing anything without putting a lot of thought and time into editing what I write. But, what the heck, I am just going to blurt out the first things that come to mind about what is happening in my racing and other things on my path to Beijing.

I am currently in Burnaby, BC taking part in a small trianing camp with two of the other three tandem cycling pairs on the Canadian Paralympic national team staying with my stoker (this is what the person in the rear of a tandem team is called). So far we have had a couple of long rides on the road, two sessions on the indoor Burnaby track, and two "Coffee rides". For those of you who are not familiar with the sport of cycling, one of the most critical parts of training is to get a large volume of kilometers on the bike so that your body builds up a resistance to the long hours in the saddle. So a long ride will usually be at least 3-4 hours and be up to 6-8 hours long. Yes, even after riding for many years, it really hurts your rear end.

For those not familiar with the difference between road cycling and track cycling; tracks for bicycles are either constructed of concrete or wood and can be indoors or outdoors. The distances can vary from around 400m around (like the track in Calgary) to around 200m (like the one in Burnaby). Similar to stock car racing, the shape is usually an oval and the corners have a very steep bank, the shorter the track is, the steeper the bank. The 200m track in Burnaby is apparently around 49 degrees, which means that one has to be going at least around 30km/h to avoid sliding off!

The picture that you see is a picture of the inside of the velodrome. Those of you that are familiar with the volleydome will recognize the resemblance to the "volleydome" in Calgary. Apparently, the BC cycling association ran out of money to maintain the velodrome, so they sold it to the BC volleyball association and now rent the track time back from the Volleyball association (hence the volleyball nets and courts in the middle).

As for the cycling tradition of the "coffee ride", this simply refers to a training ride where one only brings along the tools needed to repair a flat tire and a couple of bucks to pick up a pastry and a coffee at the half way point of the ride.

Now, you may be asking, if I am only riding for around 4-5 hours a day, what am I doing with the rest of my time? Well, I am quickly discovering that tandem bikes have twice the number of mechanical problems as a single bike. The main problem is that many of the parts are custom for a tandem bike so they are either unconventional, or hard to find. The other major problem is that the remainder of the parts are ones that are made for a single bike and therefore not build to withstand the additional stresses and strains of two people riding the tandem… so they break twice as often. So we have been spending at least an hour or two every day trying to fix various bits and pieces.

The rest of the time? Eating, sleeping, and the occasional hours of work (the laptop is a mixed blessing. The up side is that I can work on the road… but, the down side… is that I can work on the road :P)

That is enough for one day.