Le Tour de Loft

Thanks everyone for your comments/well wishes with yesterday’s post. I was somewhat having one of those down days, but I hope that with the start-up of my running this week, as minimal as it shall be, those kinds of woe-is-me days will be fewer and farther between. My husband is sure determined to make it so.

When Mario discovered yesterday, upon his return from his weekly Sunday road hockey game, that I had opted out of aqua jogging in favour of a long trainer ride in the evening, his eyes perked up. He knew I’d been having a rough morning, and decided it was high time he cooked up a trainer ride never to be forgotten. This ride, Le Tour de Loft, as he calls it, had all the elements of a classic tour. There were great mountain ranges to climb, and death-defying hills to soar down, and super long straight stretches that seemed to never end, and even a few nasty crashes too, but not to worry, I was in the clear. And all around, there were cycling fanatics screaming “Allez! Allez!”

My own personal director sportif supplying me with much-needed H2O:

The crazy devil who shows up at all the big races:

The soigneur passing off the messenger bag full of snacks:

Tour photographers jumping off the back of motorbikes to get my best side:

And even Team Garmin-Cervelo’s Thor ‘Freaking’ Hushovd; my nemesis!

One and a half hours on the trainer that went by in a flash thanks in large part to the inaugural Tour de Loft. How could I not end that ride with a huge smile on my face 😀

Who is your support for training?

TONIGHT’S PILATES:

• 6 p.m. BG before: 13.0 (correction bolus: 1 unit)
• No temp. basal
• Time: 1 hour which nearly killed me at the plank (note to self: no requesting new exercises when sick!)
• 7:30 p.m. BG after: 8.1

Another reason the time on the trainer clicked by so fast was that we watched the second half of Chasing Legends, which I first started watching last week on the trainer. And the second half, the majority of which was in the mountains, including the heroic Mt. Ventoux, was just as amazing as the first half. And as I was watching it, getting excited and pushing the pedals harder and cheering for Hincappie and Cavendish and Tony Martin, and being in awe of the brilliance that is Lance, it suddenly dawned on me that this is MY movie. I’ve watched a few “inspirational” movies now, mostly centred around running, and none to date have really inspired me. But Chasing Legends, regardless of whether you’re a cyclist or not, is serious inspiration. Watching how hard these guys work, how far they push their bodies, how they refuse to let their teams down, that resonated with me. And this quote, in particular, from Columbia HTC cyclist Maxime Monfort, I know will be the one that sticks with me on race day: “If you get pain, everybody gets pain.”

Where do you glean your pre-race inspiration from?