Canada: Day 1

Well, made it to Dundas, Ontario yesterday without any troubles. Crossing into Canada was easy: the guard was more interested in talking to us about our bikes, confessing his affection for Cervelo's and watching the Tour...needless to say, we definitly weren't expecting that!

Before we leave for the Louis Garneau Center near Quebec City, we are staying in Hamilton to do some riding (where the CHCH center is located). I am staying with Miles Eastwood and his family with my teammate Peter Jr. and they are a wonderful family! Miles, who is 15, will be racing with Peter jr. in Rimouski, and he's a great kid. A unique thing about Miles is that he has a special thing for smoothies (smoothie time is serious time, as I've observed in the mornings).  Everyone here is friendly and easy going, and best of all they love biking. Great combinations!

Team CHCH photo after our ride. Lots of helmet hair...

Anyways, in the afternoon we rode from the Eastwood's house to the CHCH center (about 11km/7mi away). We arrived for the 5pm ride, met most of the CHCH team, and we did our introductioncs before heading off for the big ride.

Rick, the CHCH coach (who is from Australia), broke us up into our 4-man teams when we arrived at the TT loop on White Swan Road. We set out to do 2 laps together, each lap was about 14k. The first lap was chaotic: everyone was trying to rip one another's legs off, so there was a lot of accelerations, de-accelerations, and terrible transistions between the 30 second pulls at the front in our paceline. At the start of our second lap, I told everyone that I thought we should try to focus more on keeping things even between pulls (no mashing of the pedals!) and everyone seemed to agree. We rode things much smoother and quite a bit faster. Good progress for day 1.

After practice, I got my Team CHCH kit and the guest-riders all donned the new kits for individual and team photos. They are very slick, and very comfortable. Afterwards Miles, Peter Jr. and myself rode back to the house with several other riders. And get this, we even have an Australian rider here! His name is Michael and he's a super nice little Aussie. He'll also be racing with Peter Jr. and Miles.

We have practice tomorrow at 12 noon in the heat of the day and more TTT work is on the agenda. Apparently it's supposed to reach upwards of 100F -- a record for this time of year in Canada. I can't wait to look at the thermometer at 9am at breakfast and have it read 85F! Hopefully the heat doesn't get us too bad...I don't want to turn into a swamp thing from all of the radiation!

We'll be leaving for the Louis Garneau Training Center on Saturday at 6am. That's near QC, so that means more time in the car driving to do...more biking! I feel like that's my second job these days. Maybe I should become a trucker?