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.