Early Morning Navel Gazing

Just coming off a lovely weekend in Ellicottville. What amazing weather! Keep it coming.

Dave, Mari and Max came down to join us on Saturday morning, full of stories of their adventures at Rock of Ages the night before and giving us plenty of excuses to do Guns and Roses impressions.

We had a great ride up Eagle and around the ski hill. I even managed to stay on my bike for the entire ride. Even though I managed not to land in the middle of any raspberry bushes this time (thank you to Mari for rescuing me last week), single-speeding is still making me feel like I am learning how to ride a mountain bike all over again – I wonder if I am getting too old for this business?

Saturday night after dinner we had planned to watch the movieDogma, one of my favourites. When we turned the TV on, all it would display was a white line running horizontally across the screen. There was a collective sense of “well what do we do now?” and Rob, half joking, offered to do an emergency Walmart run (the only kind in our house, I hasten to add) to buy a new one.

Instead, being the sensible adults we are, we broke out Dave’s 30 year old bourbon and made up names for our new puppy – arriving on 11th September.

Passing quickly through Arthur, Brian, and Graham we got more imaginative as the night went on….Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, Vlad the Impaler, Adolph Hitler, Eeyore…but eventually decided on Roo. Which we even liked when we woke up the next morning.

Amazing what you can find to amuse yourself when the TV breaks, and we still managed to get in a ride on Sunday…

So, I still haven’t found the pictures that spurred me to write my first blog post in two years (HINT: Whip It), but I thought our ride home this evening was somewhat  newsworthy.

I recently moved to our spanking new business campus in Burlington. There are many advantages to being in the new building (formally known as the Ron Joyce Centre).   Apart from the fact it is LEED Gold certified, has huge amounts of natural light, gorgeous furniture and represents an important development in raising DeGroote’s profile as a North American business school of choice, the other great thing about it is that it’s 5 minutes away from where Rob works and so we get to commute together. A huge bonus, given that during term time we don’t see each other for two days straight during the week because I am going to night classes.

Today was the first day we rode in together on our bikes. It was a beautiful morning, without the humidity we’ve suffered recently and I made it in less time than it used to take me to ride in to Hamilton. I found out the shower at the new building isn’t running hot water yet and the lock on the door wasn’t installed, but these are all minor wrinkles in an otherwise pleasant start to the day. I sang loudly and showered quickly.

The way home was a different story. The heavens OPENED and out came lots of rain. My bike got a flat tire and then the lift bridge went up for a ship and a sail boat.This isn’t that fascinating, but it certainly gives me a good excuse to post two cute pictures of my husband in his riding gear….  The one above is of him mending my tire under the lift bridge as the rain causes little rivers to flow past us on the concrete floor, and the one to the right is of him on the lift bridge waiting for the boat to pass beneath.

I ended the evening pulling out weeds from the garden and helping to clean up our neighbourhood by relieving it of a stack of red bricks from the abandoned house behind us so that I could make a border round a flower bed in our back garden.

Now enjoying a Rekorderlig cider (why does everything that comes from Sweden sound like a piece of Ikea furniture?) that Mari and Dave kindly left behind after having dinner with us last night. Yum.

It’s been a very long time since I last wrote and way to much has happened for me to give a catch up in one short post. However most things have changed. We live in a different house, in a different city, we now own a ski chalet, a hairless dog and, I think at least two more bikes. In addition to these momentous changes, the world now has iPads, you can buy a Kindle in Canada and an Icelandic volcano held up the world’s air travel for over a week. Wonders will never cease.

So really, what to write about? Perhaps nothing very much to start with, just to ease me in gently. But be prepared, once I find Rob’s camera, for an onslaught.

Rob and I are a bit stiff in the legs and lower back this morning after the Dukes Epic 8 hour race yesterday. We rode round and round a 9km loop as many times as we could for eight hours. It was a hoot.

We were lucky to be parked in the solo area with the True North team and their support crew. Housed underneath a huge tent, complete with Max the dog, they adopted us and were just brilliant, helping us with their encouragement, filling water bottles and passing us food.

I felt dreadful at the end and didn’t really have as good a day as I had hoped. With the pain behind me, I can see where I need to improve in my training and, it was a great learning experience to take forward to the rest of the season (most notably the Crank in September).

In a nut shell, my long distance training to date has been to do a maximum of four and a half hours of riding, and, sure enough, up to the four and a half hour mark yesterday I felt great but after that, I was more or less just focusing on finishing without doing myself any damage.

All that said, Team Wanderlust (Rob, Tecla and I) and the True North guys did really well. Mari and Jen (True North), who were doing a tag team, came 1st in the Women’s Tag Team category, Rob was fourth in the Solo Men’s 40+ category and I was sixth in the Womens Solo (which isn’t defined by age groups because there were only 13 of us, so, just in passing, I’d like to note that two of the women who beat me where under 29).

Jasmin took quite a few photos of the day, and I’ll link to them when they are up on the web, but just to give you an idea of the sort of state you get into after 8 hours of riding in the dust, check out the one above taken at the end of a similar race last year. I’m still trying to get the grit out of my eyes this morning.

Rob and I are in an 8 hour endurance race tomorrow and so,following the instructions of our coach and all the advice of the books about racing, we’ve been taking it easy this week. I can’t say I’ve really enjoyed this enforced relaxation (which has made me more RESTLESS than RELAXED), but I am prepared to give it a go. One of the good things that came out of being couch potatoes was the opportunity, last night, to catch a TV show called “So You Think You Can Dance”.

Young amateur dancers lined up to audition for a shot at the big time in Las Vegas, and this guy, in the YouTube video below, was absolutely incredible. I have no clue how anyone one can move like this, but I could watch his set over and over again.

This post is just another excuse to link to Tecla’s Flickr site. We went to Mari’s house in Hamilton for dinner on Saturday night. Her husband, Dave, is still in Tokyo and so we thought we’d send him a Tokyo style “hello” courtesy of Tecla’s photo skills.

Rob and I have been “negotiating” for about 24 months on the subject of a new car. He has the VW Westfalia and I have my ’97 Civic. Lately, Rob has been riding into work everyday. This is just one of the reasons why he looks like Canada’s answer to Lance Armstrong at the moment and is in the best shape of his life (I won’t take any credit for my cooking here). He has bought good rain gear and his ride to work is relatively safe on local roads. It seems like an arrangement that will stick.

I can’t ride to work as I frequently need my car for meetings, the dress code is more professional, we don’t have showers and I work further away. However, I have been getting increasingly more frustrated with my little car as it gets older and more and more things seem to go wrong. First the drivers side window stopped rolling up or down (I have to get out of the car whenever I enter a car park where you have to collect a ticket before the barrier will lift). Also, whenever I go over a bump the windshield wipers switch themselves on, which isn’t that useful on a dry day.

Negotiations concluded last weekend and we decided that we really and truly are going to sell the van (honest!) and we would shop for a new car. We’d pretty much decided on a Toyota Matrix. Reasonable gas mileage and a good sized boot (or whatever you call it in Canada) for all our gear.

Off we went to the Toyota Dealership in Milton (Gorruds for anyone wishing to avoid a really awful customer service experience) with our “we want to spend money at your outlet, what have you got?” faces on. I am not even going to give details on the bull shit we had to wade through with their people just to buy a car that we had already decided we wanted before we arrived, but needless to say, after about the fourth attempt to sell me financing, rust protection, multiple extended warranties and then some nonsense about how it was illegal to throw in a roof rack that was probably worth about $2.50 at cost, we left, deciding that there is only so much insulting our meagre intelligence could take.

Again I’ll spare the details, but we ended up with the most amazing car that I thought in my life I would never be able to say that I owned. A Mazda 6 Hatchback. It has heated (leather) seats. You can actually hear the stereo above the engine and it goes like s**t off a shovel. I am not ashamed to say that I am impressed with myself when I am driving it. The hatchback is huge, enough for at least two bikes and all our gear (although, God knows I’ll have a fit the first time we put muddy stuff in the back).

It is not fuel efficient by any stretch of anyones imagination, and I did dream that Al Gore paid us a personal visit last night to give us a telling off for being so flagrantly irresponsible, but it is a pleasure to drive and Rob, I am sure, is making up for our carbon consumption by riding in everyday, so I don’t feel too guilty. Zoom, Zoom as they say…

For the uninitiated, an “O’Cup” refers to the Ontario Cup cycling races that take place each year here in…Ontario. There’s a cross country mountain biking O’Cup and a road riding O’Cup. I don’t know much about the road series, but the MTB series consists of 8 races over the course of spring, summer and fall at various locations across Ontario (surprise!).

You get points for where you place in each race. The best five of your races gets added up to decide on where you place in your category for the season. Top 3 get some kind of kudos, and probably a prize. There are various categories for both men and women as well as a “Sport” category for people who are less serious and an “Expert” category for the hard asses. Needless to say, this being my first O’Cup season, I am in the Sport category and after last weekend, very glad to be there. The standard is high!

We drove up in the VW with Mari, bumped into Debs and Carl on the way, and met loads of people we knew once we were up there. It served to soothe the nerves a bit, seeing so many familiar faces.

The race was really very different to anything I’ve done before. Usually we do long races of 60km and more. You keep eating, maintain a certain heart rate and at the end, sheer guts and determination get you through to the finish line.

An O’Cup race is totally different. Firstly it’s very short, about 18km-20km. There is no time to eat, drink, look behind to see where your competitors are, or make any major technical or mechanical mistakes, it’s over in a little more than an hour. You ride like your pants were on fire and you’re being chased by a bear. You can’t hear yourself think because you’re breathing so heavily and you wonder whether your lungs are going to explode. You feel like you are going to vomit as you push, push, push to the finish line. The gaps between first second and third can be less than a minute. It’s bonkers. I loved it. I have never ever felt my competitive streak in such a visceral way. I am hooked.

I pulled in a respectable fourth in my category, due partly to the fact that Tecla was hot on my heels the entire race (and there is just a smidge of friendly rivallry between the two of us). Rob actually podiumed with a third place in his group and Debs and Dave also came third in their category.

We did really well as a group and afterwards hung out in the sunshine and swapped war stories. Our next one is in two weeks. I can’t wait.

Lisa, Dave’s wife, who is the best support person anyone could hope for, took some photos of the day. I have put the ones she sent to me on my Facebook page and Tecla has some other really nice ones on her Flickr site.

Lately, CBC radio has been driving me crazy in the mornings. This could be down to the fact that my beloved Andy Barrie (I had to look the spelling of his name up, as in Canada, it is said more like “Andy Berry”) seems to be on the air less and less. But I am sure there has been a change in their programming.

Increasingly it seems,the focus of their extended coverage is designed to convince us all that the world is going to s**t and we’ll probably all be dead soon of pollution/gang warefare/positive discrimination. Added to the fact that, in an attempt to reflect the multicultural nature of their Canadian listenership, they seem to have lost sight of what actually consitutes decent music. In my humble opinion, just because some group of dwarves playing the nose flute and six plastic bottles is from Tibet, it doesn’t make them worthy of airtime!!

As such I have been turning to my ipod to keep me amused on the way to work. Thank God for podcasts. I found this one, called “The Now Show” from the good old British Broadcasting Company, and it has me rolling in the aisles. This, to me, is British humour at its best. There’s no political correctness here, and no cultural sensitivity. Mind you, there’s no discrimination here either – everybody gets the piss taken out of them!!!

Although the official date was a couple of weeks ago, for me, the beginning of Spring is marked annually by our participation in the Paris to Ancaster bike race. More like a cyclocross race than a mountain bike race, it is usually a mud fest and can be quite the epic. This year almost everyone we knew did the 60km, peddling against 20km head winds to try to beat last year’s time.

Each year they have some kind of celebrity rider take part and this year was Sue Palmer, the Candian Olympian. Dave Enns who is kicking butt this year already, had the pleasure of actually beating her by 30 seconds!!! Rob was only a couple of minutes behind. Debbie wasn’t quite so chuffed about her participation, as they are both in the same age category, but she still pulled in an awesome time inspite of the fact that she was riding the 60km for the first time.

I’ve included a couple of pictures here that Caitlin took of the beginning of the race, you can just see Matt smiling from behind the guy in the Oscar the Grouch shirt in the first one and then the second one has Tim riding hot on the heels of Tecla (who looks like she is going out to kill someone).

It was a fun day, rounded off with a couple of beers on our patio afterwards. Arrrr, the season has begun at last.