Louis Garneau Club House

The Louis Garneau club house is a pretty neat place to be staying before Rimouski. It sits on the banks right above the St.Lawrence River on a converted horse farm. The house itself has a great bunkhouse above the tv and kitchen area, where all of the girls are sleeping. Out back beyond the large garage and barn we pitched numerous tents for the boys. Everywhere you look it's blue skies...green grass and some smaller hills (small by Vermont standards, that is!) off in the distance. It's extremely windy, but it's refreshing after having to deal with stuffy air back in Ontario. It's crisp, and it has just enough of a bite to it to feel leave you feeling completely refreshed.  Of course, the wind is not exactly welcomed when we are on our bikes...

Louis Garneau team car and trailer 

The barn where we've been keeping our bikes and where we house the rollers

Just a shot of the boys tents. Putting them up was a real pain – it was super windy and we were super tired.
What  a bad combination! 

Anyways, we had a 10+ hour drive from Ontario to get to the house (just outside of QC). After pitching tents, unpacking the van and getting our living space situations figured out, we all hit the rollers for 30 minutes. I hadn't been on rollers in what seemed like ages (!), but Rick helped me out for maybe 15 seconds before I got the hang of it. Rollers are nice, because there's no resistance, so it's a great way to just open the legs up and have a nice high cadence. The only hard part is of course balancing. Sometimes you can ride yourself off the rollers or lose your balance and hit the floor. Luckily none of this happened to us.

This morning I hit the rollers again, this time at 7.30am and with the boys – we blasted music (I'm talking techo-pump up and some Nirvana!) and the girls got a bit grumpy about being woken up by the vibrating bass of the music because the garage is directly below our bunk. To that I say though luck – 7.30am isn't early by bike racer standards anyways...

After showering and eating breakfast we headed out at 10am for our ride. We rode ~12km out along the main road here to a little snack bar. All the while, we passed quite a bit of other riders headed in the opposite direction – must have been some sort of a charity ride. Anyways, Rick had us start at 30 second intervals for a 5k individual tt; basically he wanted to get some numbers and see where everyone stood. I posted the second fastest time for the girls, about 5 seconds off of Saskia, who is the Canadian National TT champion! After heading back to the snackbar we then did a ttt effort on the same 5k course. Things were slow in my group today – which was quite frustrating. Everyone (including myself!) was pretty sloppy with their transitions, and I passed the 5k mark not even feeling wasted. That left me scratching my head a bit. I'd say we have some things to tweak before Rimouski. 

After lunch I headed down to the St.Lawrence River (about 1km away) with Miles' mom, Kathy. It was such a beautiful afternoon! When we emerged from the trail, there was still quite some distance to the actual river, but we did have sandy beaches to walk along, so after collecting some neat rocks and snapping a few pictures we headed West along the sand. 

A barn on the way to the St.Lawrence 

Miles' mom talking about the St.Lawrence. Since her son had done a project on the river and immigration in 5th grade, she still remembered a lot of interesting facts about the whole journey for the new settlers. Pretty neat! 

Our footprints in the sand. We walked to the very end before the sand became a bog...

We had a great 1hr team meeting tonight, talking about tactics and attacking, and everything in between. Rick outlined 4 essential things as a checklist for us, and the first 3 were pretty simple to check off (training? healthy? bike good?). The fourth was BELIEF. He then asked us to think about the upcoming race, and think about our chances of winning. If we believed we could win the race, he asked us to raise our hands. The majority (myself included) raised our hands, but a few didn't. He didn't say anything, but he then told us that when he was coaching a team of elite triathletes headed to Nationals way back when in Australia, he asked them the same question – 'which of you here think you will win a medal?' And not one of them raised their hands.  For crying out loud, they were freakin' ELITE athletes – the creme de la creme – and even they struggled to see themselves winning something they had trained so hard for in the past year. He said if you aren't 100% mentally prepared to believe in yourself while the other three factors of training, health and equipment are taken care of, you won't reach your full potential as a competitor and your just wasting your time. You should be able to look in the mirror after each race, and tell yourself that you did everything you could to ride your best. Even if you didn't win or you came in last place – if you gave it your all, in the end that's all that matters. And the same is true for contributing towards your team. 

Hearing Rick talk about these things was really great – especially with so much racing coming up, these are just the things you need before absolutely killing yourself each day for 7 days. It's going to be an interesting journey!