The Week that was....and the Week Ahead

I got back from Kelowna Sunday night, with an evening flight on WestJet. Monday and Tuesday were a couple of easy days for me, just getting back into the swing of things.

Wednesday was a hard swim with the group in the pool....which I stunk up the joint in. Guess I needed one more day...we did 2 rounds of 6 X 100 best average on 1:30. I was really hurting in the water...starting off at 1:09's and falling off to 1:12's by the 5th and 6th interval.

Simon and some of the others going to Worlds did a wicked run workout down at Beacon Hill. They did 4 intervals on the Harder than Hamish loop. Simon took down his own course record 3 times out of the intervals....a very BAMF effort.

Joel has been giving out BAMF caps we had made...for BAMF type performances in workouts. Jordan and Simon were the first to get caps (Jordan for a 200 km ride at high wattage, Simon for breakign the Harder than Hamish loop). Andrew got a cap last week when a group of us went 15:30 for the big loop in Thetis (w. a leadout from Kieren), Kirsten got a cap for a hard ass treadmill workout she did, and Kyle and Terenzo got caps for dipping under 6:00 for the Hamish Loop (Simon has the record at 5:45 now I think).

Joel offered me a BAMF cap for my hard efforts this year, but I told him this morning that I had to earn the cap. We warmed up with a small island in the wetsuit, followed by a small island loop at medium/strong effort in the wetsuit as well (10:20). The group finished with another small loop hard (A Mac leading them through in 9:45), but I took the wetsuit off and attempted to break Colin's non-wetsuit Big Island TT record of 15:51. I ended up going 15:44, earning my BAMF cap from Joel.

I finished off the day helping AP out with his final hard workout before his U23 race at Worlds next week - 6 X 1km on Lochside trail. I jogged the first 500m of so of each interval ahead of AP, and then picked him up at 500m as a pacer for the final half km each time. AP was an animal, having 5 of his 6 at 2:55 or under, and his slowest being 3:00 (the uphill interval).

I'm now all packed up, and heading back to Ontario this weekend for the fall. The majority of the group leaves Sunday and Monday to go to Hamburg World Champs, but I'll be driving from Victoria to Holland Landing. I'm picking up my mom in Vancouver on Saturday (she's gonna provide some company and we'll split the driving) and we'll hit the road Sunday morning for Ontario. Not looking forward to sitting in a car seat for 50hrs or so...but should be a cool trip non the less.

I'm gonna miss the whole group out here....but I'll be able to save $$ living at home, and I'll re-join the group in January somewhere.

I'll try to blog each night on the trip home....

Dano