Le Tour begins

Well Robbie McEwen did it again.

After a prologue that wasn't overly surprising except maybe for hope well Kloden did. He is the favorite in my book to win the tour this year. I just think that Vino will crack, as will Valverde in my mind. also as much as many on this side of the pond want him to, I just don't think Levi can pull it off.

I wouldn't mind seeing Evans or Moreau on top of the podium in the end, but I wouldn't put money on it. I think we'll have a better ides though after stage 8 or 9.

Meanwhile today's opening stage, wow. You would normally think that crashing and hurting your wrist 20km from the finish would rule you out for a stage win but Robbie showed why he is the favorite to win the green jersey in my mind today. I watched the highlights of the sprint finish and it was just sick how he accelerated past everyone like they were standing still. Unfortunately that included my main man Boonen who was also beaten to the line by Husholvd. With a mediocre Prologue, it's would take a lot for Boonen to get the yellow so I think he'll have to concentrate on stage wins and just surviving the second week.

Hopefully McEwen will be OK after his crash today as I would hate for something like that to take him out of contention for the green jersey.

Last week on the bike

despite my experience on the group ride and the heat this week it was a very good week on the bike.

I wasn't able to get out on Tuesday, but L & I rode about 20 miles on Wed morning. Was a good pretty fast ride until L hit a bump while eating her powerbar and dropped it. She had waited too long to eat and this did not help things. Oh well, we took it easy and got home fine without someone getting too crabby.

I was able to commute on Thu and Friday this week which was nice and add in my ride Thu night and rides both Sat and Sun and it was a hectic week.

Of course I won't be getting hardly any miles in this week due to a trip to chi-town thu-sun but week after it'll be back in the saddle hopefully with at least one group ride to show for it (and I better not flat on that one)

Weekly total - 81
Season total - 752

If something can go wrong...

So I have been thinking of trying out some group rides for a while as I kind of feel plateaued in my biking as well as wanting to learn some new rides.

With some prodding from a friend (thanks sara) I decided this weekend was it and I wasn't going to put it off any longer. So I went on the Sonny Side Up ride through TCBC today. I figured it was only 25 miles and a "B" ride which is the level I have been riding alone, so perfect.

Well the group splintered immediately with some faster riders just taking off and I missed that bus but I was definitely faster than the B pace so i settled in with some people that seemed to be going my pace and everything was fine. I kind of lost people when we climbed Franklin St hill on the river road, but I am so used to that hill by now it doesn't even faze me. Eventually another rider caught up and we were having a good conversation when I heard a hiss coming from my back tire.

yep wouldn't you know it, my first group ride and I punctured halfway through. Luckily the guy I was with stayed to help out as I didn't realize how inept I was at changing a flat (patch didn't want to stick, co2 cartridge didn't fire, etc.).

so I had to bail out as the trip home was closer than the finish.

oy

hopefully my next attempt goes a little better

Tornado Tom

We'll see if I can get this to work, but velonews had some video of Tom Boonen's pre-Tour press conference. I found his comments on the UCI rider's pledge to be interesting. AS many other commentators have noted, it's kind of ridiculous that riders don't have some sort of union or say in all of this. Good goal, but bad methods




Edit: Well this didn't work out quite as I would have liked as I can't seem to be able to shrink it down to fit in the normal space. hmmmmmm. anyone with any suggestions can feel free to chime in. thanks

long and winding road

I just finished reading The Road and though many other people have sung it’s praises (it’s an Oprah book club selection after all), I have to add my 2 cents as well because it’s been a while since I was so taken with a novel and could barely put it down. Due to my school, work, and biking schedules I don’t have a lot of free time to read but I made time for this book staying up way later than advisable to finish it in 4 days (fast when most books of similar length take 3-4 weeks usually).

What I found fascinating is that when you boil it down, it is a simple timeless story of a father trying to understand his son and raise him the best he can. It reminded me of the relationship that I have with my own father in a way or at least the relationship.

When I finished high school I seemed destined for the standard path of a college degree before I knew what I really wanted in life and then some job and probably a house in the ‘burbs, but at the last minute I veered off that path. Convinced my parents to let me attend school for recording engineering which wasn’t really what I wanted to do but was closer and seemed like a good option. I then began to get a little more serious about DJing and trying to make a go at that. All this time my relationship with my father went from mediocre to rocky. Once I wasn’t in school he kept trying to convince me to get a job that would pay me good money but wouldn’t necessarily leave time to pursue a DJ career. His view was that you needed to work hard and make money first and then if you had time or energy you could pursue “fun” stuff.

From my view, it was important to follow your passion and to not settle for something because you were afraid to fail. Though we did have fights over this, since I rarely saw him it really just made us drift apart even more and I found less and less time for him which only exacerbated it.

What does this have to do with a novel about a father and son struggling to survive in a post-nuclear holocaust landscape? I guess I just connected with the father doing what he knew how to do—survive and keep his son safe. This while his son gives people the benefit of the doubt despite everything he has seen. The father thinks his son is just being naive about people but it may be that his son is looking at life in the only way that can bring people together instead of tearing them apart even more.

Beyond that I found Cormac McCarthy’s descriptions of the landscape and the people within it to be both breathtakingly and heartbreakingly real. I wasn’t too sure if I wanted to read this when it came out last year and when I did put it on my amazon list finally, the following week it was announced as the next Oprah Book Club selection and that made me rethink it, but I figured that she had selected quite a few other good books, so what the hell. Very glad that I did read it and if you haven’t I HIGHLY recommend it.

My current book queue:
The End of Poverty (in progress)
The Polysyllabic Spree (in progress – balances the dry second half of End of Poverty)
Book of Dave
Essays – George Orwell
Nightwatch
Ulysses