Pet Owners Behaving Badly

Above, T-Mobile rider Marcus Burghardt collides with a loose dog during yesterday's 9th stage of the Tour de France. I caught the video replay during the TV coverage on OLN, and it brought back memories of 11 weeks ago, when I met a similar fate. The big difference is, I was commuting home from work, while Burghardt was trying to make a living, riding in the toughest bike race on earth. I was quite disgusted to see that the dog had no collar, and the owner showed little remorse for his irresponsible actions. If Burghardt's carbon-fibre wheel hadn't absorbed most of the shock by folding like a taco on impact, he might well have been seriously injured. Fortunately, Marcus was only slightly injured, and came back as one of the animators on today's stage. (AFP Photo)

Training Camp
Friday, July 13th
Sunny, 35 deg C, breezy

Above, slipping into my wetsuit before the 3800m swim. Note the protruding left clavicle, my battle scar from a similar crash to the top photo. (Photo by Van)

Friday was the last big training day of Ironspirit camp. We swam the 3800m Ironman course, with buoys located exactly as on race day, complete with kayak and motorboat support. I had a great set of feet to draft from to the first buoy at around 1600m, then took the lead of a group of six or seven at the turn and set the pace for the rest of the way.

Sighting back to the beach was made easy by the new highrise condo development directly in line with the swim exit. My roomie Brendan drafted perfectly off me the whole swim, just tickling my feet, and stayed with me even when I surged a few times. Once on shore, I found out he was swimming nearly blind due to nearsightedness, and stayed on my feet out of desperation. Not at all a bad strategy on race day!

It wasn't a great swim split (1:16) but we were all fatigued from the volume of cycling and running of the previous four days, and swimming is where fatigue first manifests itself. This wasn't about a fast swim split anyway, more an exercise in drafting and sighting. When we are six weeks more fit and tapered on August 26th, the times of the group I swam with should be closer to the 1:10-or-under mark.

I'm nearly a week behind on posts, but during training camp, I was either too tired to post, or busy watching le Tour. We had our own little tour going most days, but without drug scandals or errant dogs. Next I'll post about an epic final ride, up Apex Mountain, on Friday afternoon.

Above, into the drink, the warm waters of Okanagan Lake. (Photo by Van)