http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD_S-KxW9ho
May
14
May
04
A lot of you have been asking where we’ll be and when during the course of our ride. Here is an overview of our schedule for the month of June.
May 30-June 2 - I’m flying out to Vancouver a couple of days in advance of the event to get settled in, unpack my bike and do some riding with the rest of the team. This will be the first opportunity that we’ve had to ride together as a single group.
June 2 - We leave Vancouver with stops at Sears Pacific Center and the Vancouver Oncology Center.
June 4 - Edmonton
June 5 - Calgary
June 8 - Winnipeg
June 9 - Kenora
June 10 - Thunder Bay
June 12 - London
June 13 - Hamilton to Toronto
June 14 - Toronto to Kingston
June 16 - Ottawa
June 17 - Montreal
June 18 - Quebec City
June 20 - Truro
June 20 - Halifax
Our complete schedule is detailed here [SNKCR 2008 Ride Schedule and Stage Rides Detail]. Note: This schedule also includes stage rides as well. Stage rides are local rides that are happening in each community along the way, but these are separate rides from our rides. I am not completely sure if we will be present at each of the stage rides. If you think you’d like to come out and show your support, please drop me an email or leave me a comment and I will inquire specifically about where would be the best spot to come out and meet us, along with an approximate time.
Just in case you were wondering exactly how much training we are doing for this ride, here is a visual that might help.This only covers the distance that I’ve logged since January 19th. I still need to upload my data from November, December and the first half of January!
Mar
22
We’re 71 days out from the start of the ride. I’m feeling really good about the training and would love to do the ride now. If it weren’t for the obvious cold, I think we could pull it off!
Our training schedule is starting to ramp up, the coming weeks are getting pretty intense.
This coming week, ending March 30th, we’re scheduled to do a 523 kilometres. The long ride is 215km.
The rest of our “Prep2″ phase looks like this…
- Week ending April 6th - 594 kilometers
- Week ending April 13th - 673 kilometers
- Week ending April 20th - 428 kilometers. This is our “rest” week!
Our longest ride in April will be 265 kilometers. This is still a long shot away from my longest ride - 322 kilometers - but this is still a huge undertaking - almost 9 hours at a reasonable pace, assuming that I don’t take any breaks!
The great news is that by the time that I’m going to have to do this ride, the weather will be good enough that doing it on the road will be highly likely. Hell, as long as there isn’t snow on the ground and the temp is above zero, I’m pretty likely to opt for doing this ride outside. I can’t imagine spending 9 hours on the trainer!
Wish me luck.
Mar
22
Mar
15
Sorry that I haven’t updated the blog in so long. I’ve been so busy with work and training that I have very little time for very little else.
Just ask Amanda 
I live in Toronto and this year, we’ve had record snowfalls. Needless to say, I’ve been doing all of my ride training indoors. Most of my miles are logged on a stationary trainer that I use with my road bike, but I also do three spin classes per week to stay motivated. I don’t mind riding by myself, but riding indoors on a stationary trainer is mind numbing at the best of times. I pass the time watching movies and listening to music, but even that gets stale after a few thousand kilometers.
We’ve had a couple of nice days so far this year, but all of them fell on work days. Sigh. I have managed to squeak in a few short rides after work, but nothing really satisfying.
Finally today, the weather and my work schedule lined up. It was a balmy four degrees celcius, so after my regular Saturday morning spin class, I donned my knickers, lubed my legs up with hot balm, grabbed some food and headed out on my single-speed road bike.
This time of year, there’s just too much salt on the road to take out either of my other road bikes - in prior years, this meant heading out on my commuter bike, or waiting until the roads dried out. Last fall, I decided to get proactive and I picked up a cheap bike that I could use for spring training.
The weather was great - a little bit of wind, but it was bright, sunny and not too cold. Definitely the best conditions that I could expect for this time of the year. I had planned to try and meet up with a ride group, but I got my times mixed up and was an hour late for the start because I was at my spin class until 8:30. Nevertheless, I knew the route they were supposed to be taking, so I headed out to find them.
My route took me down Lakeshore Boulevard through Etobicoke, Mississauga, Oakville and into Burlington. I turned around when I hit Brant Street after a 15 minute food and bio break at the Second Cup.
Coming back into Etobicoke, I saw a ride group ahead of me. In the back of my head, I thought there was a long shot that it might be the group I was supposed to have gone out with in the first place. After a couple of kilometers, I caught up to them, but it wasn’t my group. Evidently my training is paying off because I dropped them pretty quickly. 
Dec
11
I started my training for the ride a few weeks back. Nothing formal - some spinning, running weights - that kind of stuff. Last week, we received our formal training program from CanFit. It is a highly serious program. I haven’t actually started the program yet. I have had a wicked cold and didn’t want to overdo anything so I simply continued with the running, spinning and weights while I worked on getting ride of my cold.
My plan is to start the program tomorrow night with some test protocols to set the baselines against which I’ll be measuring improvements over the course of the training program. Tomorrow’s tests should be fairly straightforward. I will be tired for them as I am also going to fit in a running clinic before the testing. The Wednesday night clinics usually consist of short, fast runs - last week we covered 4k in approximately 17 minutes.
Tonight I ran a slow 6.4k - 37:51 with an average HR of 160. My 1 minute HR recovery was 163 to 127. I weighed in at 195.3 - down from 204 at the start of my pre-training in late November. Now its time for bed - 5am comes early. Why am I getting up so early? The same reason I gave up caffeine. I’ll explain later.
After my 2006 season, I started to think about where I wanted to take my riding. I definitely wanted to start racing, but hadn’t quite settled on what kind of racing.
Initially, I thought MTB racing might be the way to go. I entered a few events and I had the endurance and power, but it turns out I’m just not coordinated enough to pull off the bike handling that MTB racing requires.Crits looked interesting, but I didn’t quite feel the drive to go toe to toe with someone in the corners.
I eventually settled on going long.
Going long means riding against the clock for hours on end trying to cover the event distance before the clock ran out. These are also called “brevets” (pronounced “brah-vays”) and come in a variety of distances starting at around 100miles and working their way up to 1200 and 1600 mile multi-day events and ultimately, the world-class RAAM - the Race Across America.There’s no question that the RAAM might be a little bit out of reach given my current abilities, but I knew that I had what it took to pull off the shorter brevets. I set it in my sights to start with at least two 200 mile rides for 2007 and then shoot for a cross-provincial ride for 2008.
Sometime during the spring, a national stage-race called “The Crossing” caught my attention. This event is a six week stage race that sees a handful of riders cross Canada in Tour de France fashion - 200-300 kilometre stages, 6 days out of 7 until the job was done. Ever since I was a kid I’d had a secret dream to ride my bike across the country. Doing it with the benefit of a full support team in race format was totally up my alley. I really had no idea how to make it happen - how to get ready for it, but I knew I that this was definitely something I wanted to do.
I started reading up on ultra-distance cycling and started talking to people that had completed similar events. My training rides took on a different tone and I started to look at a really long ride as something that was just a little bit longer than the last long ride I’d already completed.Just a little bit further, everytime, until long started looking really long. 100 miles, 200 miles, more…
Sometime during the spring, I was out on a Tour For Kids training ride when Jeff Rushton, a team RAAM record-holder, let me in on a little secret - he and the rest of the folks behind the Tour For Kids were going to do a national benefit ride to raise money for childhood cancer research. The second that the words were out of Jeff’s mouth I knew that I needed to get on his ride somehow. He was proposing to cover more distance than The Crossing, but he was shooting to do it in almost 1/2 the time. More interesting to me was that his ride had purpose. The Crossing was a race, a big long hairy one to be sure, but I knew that riding with purpose was going to be much more meaningful than trying to win some medal or title.
“Getting on the Ride” was the only thing I could think about for months. It was with me during my clubs rides, my crit training, my daily commute and for every inch of my weekend long rides. It was the only thing I could think about during my initial double-century in June, it screamed at me inside my head during the Tour for Kids in August, and it kept me going through a miserable double this past September.In October, applications finally opened up. They were looking for 75 riders to join the cause. I desperately needed to be one of them. I spent a lot of time thinking about my application before I filed it. I talked it through with my references looking for possible problems and made sure that they knew how serious I was about the event. I barely gave work an option when I asked for the time off. An entire month out of the office won’t be easy to manage around, but I knew that I had six months to prepare and plan for it - and besides, I never take vacation anyways
A couple of weeks ago, I finally got word back.
I made the ride.
I was ecstatic. Thrilled. After months of obsessing about whether or not I could make the ride, there it was in black and white - I was going to ride my bike across the country. Well, I was invited to join the ride - I knew that successfully completing the ride purely depended on what I did to get ready for it for the next six months.
This journal will document these efforts.
