July 2007 Archives

I did it. Yesterday I cycled a stage of the Tour de France. Or close to it anyway -- it's not quite the same route, and admittedly, it wasn't mountain stage, but still... I rode 120 miles (192km) in 8 hours 22 minutes and 7 seconds.

And the important thing is that I achieved my goal. Or rather I achieved one of my downgraded goals.

I started out kind of optimistic. "Top 50%". That lasted until I showed up at the start and saw my competition. Then I thought, "Okay, let's try to be somewhere above the bottom third". Going up the first big hill I had the first of many woman zoom past me. At that point, I thought, "Okay, I can't let her beat me." A bit sexist I admit. Not to mention stupid. I gave up after about five minutes. Then I thought "Okay, but maybe I can be in the top half of the women." After all, I quite like the top half of most women. But sadly, nope. Pretty close though. If I pretend I'm a woman, I would have finished 102nd out of 191.

Towards the end all the illusions dropped away and I remember thinking, "please don't let me be in the bottom 10%". And HA! I trashed that goal. My placing means I finished in the top 75% of everyone who finished. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Lance Fancy-pants Armstrong!

It's Canada Day and, thanks to treeplanting, what Canada means to me is 9 hours a day of brutal physical exertion in the pouring rain. I'm celebrating by doing the London to Canterbury cyclosportive. The route follows the first stage of this year's Tour de France and is about 200km long. The weather forecast predicts vicious thunder storms. So, if all goes according to plan, it should work out to about nine hours of horrific toil in the pouring rain. Happy Canada Day, eh!

I'm testing out a live GPS tracking service. Hopefully, the map above should show my current (or at least recent location). Go to http://www.sportsdo.net/Yanda/ to see the full track.

Giv'er!