Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

The new Harry Potter trailer is out.
Can't wait until November 21st

Back to Back Blogs!

Hopefully I can keep this up!

We started out the morning with an open water swim at Thetis. I didn't feel quite on today, the stroke wasn't there. A small island loop for warm-up, some short intervals, out to the small island and back, short intervals, out to small island and back, and ended with some short intervals.

This afternoon, Jordan, Lauren, Kirsten and myself headed to Lochside for some km repeats.
Joel said that we were going to do "n" intervals. N could be any number, but we wouldn't know until we were at n-1. It keeps it more interesting that way, and you just keep going.

N turned out to be 10. So the workout was 10 x 1km on 5:00. Joel wanted us to run them at 10km race pace. I was aiming for 3:20-3:25 per km. The odd intervals were a slight downhill, while the even ones are slight uphill, hence the difference in times.

3:24, 3:27, 3:22, 3:27, 3:22, 3:30, 3:23, 3:29, 3:21, 3:26

Jordan was rocking the workout today, smoking me by about 10 seconds on every interval!

I headed down to Hernandez in the evening with Colin and Jordan for the most amazing burritos! some mini pork taco's and a pork burrito....MMMmmm

An easy 60' to loosen the legs out finished off the night.

Here's a great story on Micheal Phelps and his quest for 8 Gold Medals

Also, here's a link to the 2008 Beijing Medal Challenge, which has a grand prize of a trip to the Bahamas. The premise of the challenge is to choose 1 country per 30 different sporting events at the Olympics. You may only use each country once. For example, if you select the United States as the country for the aquatics category, you cannot select the United States again throughout the duration of the Contest Entry Period.

OK, I am still here...

Wow, three weeks since I last updated the blog.

A lot has happened since I last updated, I traveled back to Ontario to race (bad) and spend a bit of time at home (good). Back out to Vic now, and we're down to the final 2 weeks or so until the guys depart for Beijing on the 12th of August. I can't believe how close we are to the games starting. I can't wait to watch the Olympics knowing that I have trained with the men's team for the better part of two years now.

The Geneva continental cup was a tough race. I had a good swim, coming out of the water in 3rd or so, in a small lead group of 6 or so. Brian Fleischmann and Cameron Dye got away quickly at the beginning of the bike, ad we never saw them the rest of the day. They ended up with a 2:00 lead off the bike, while our group got swallowed up by the groups behind, forming a group of roughly 15-18 athletes. I has goose bumps on the bike despite it being 90 F out, and once on the run, I had nothing, zero. I pulled the plug at 5km, after hoping that the legs might come around.

Our group of 6 out of the water, losing time to Fleischmann and Dye

After the race, I went camping that night down in Watkins Glen with my sister and her boyfriend which was awesome. A juicy steak over the fire, a few rum and cokes, and some smores!




My time at home flew by, and soon I was back out to Victoria. Our group is all back together now, with Simon, Colin, Jordan back from NYC Triathlon, and Kyle is back from his European World Cup adventures. We've been getting some solid training in right now, highlighted by a motor-pacing workout today in pouring rain. Tomorrow calls for a swim at Thetis Lake, and some km repeats on Lochside.

I'm two weeks out from Nationals in Kelowna on Aug 17th, after which I'll be watching the Women's Olympic race at 7pm PST, flying back to Vic the next morning, and getting pumped to watch the men's race Monday night at 7pm. I can't wait!

After that, it'll be time to do a little change-over on my bike, and to start putting in some longer miles getting ready for Ironman Florida at the beginning of November.

Happy 4th of July!

Happy Independence Day to Rappstar and all my American readers!



The 4th of July brings about one of my favorite events, the Nathan's Hot Dog eating contest.

This year promises to be another good one, as Takeru Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut go head to head again this year. Chestnut broke Kobayashi's World Record last year, eating 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes! Kobayashi only ate 63.


Training has been going well the last couple of days. Wednesday was a 2.5 hr base ride, with a 60' hilly run off the bike, while today we had an easy swim in the morning, and then 4 X single lap TT efforts up at the Waddling Dog, descending efforts. Managed to descend through the workout, as my legs came around a bit as we went through the workout. 14:00, 13:45, 13:30, 13:05. The boys who are racing Lifetime and NYC were tricked out on their TT bikes today, and boy were they moving!!

The biggest news out of the US Swim Trials was the fact that Brendan Hanson didn't even make the team in the 200 BR. Instead, two guys that are his training partners beat him out for the spots to the Olympics. Hanson is a former WR holder, and the 2nd fastest man ever in the 200 BR, but won't have a shot at a medal in Beijing.

Sidney Days 5km

Jordan and I headed up to Sidney this morning for their annual Canada day 5km race. We both raced it last year, and it's a fun, fast course.

Jordan has written a great race report at his blog, and I'll go over it a bit as well.

Jordan took the pace out pretty strong through the first km to rid ourselves of any others. We were through 1km in 2:59, and soon shed the one remaining guy soon after. At this point, I moved to the front to help Jordan. We made a left hand turn, and instead of staying on the left hand side of the road, we went to the right side following the lead bike (my fault). We ended up having to cross back to the other side again at the turnaround, which probably cost us a few extra seconds.

We went through 2km in 6:12, and 3km in 9:32. At this point we knew we had to run pretty strong on the back half to crack 16:00. We were swapping off the lead, which helped both of us keep the effort high. We went through 4km at 12:53, meaning we'd have to dig deep to hit 16:00. Jordan turned it on at this point, and I just wasn't able to respond. Jordan ran away from me for the overall win in 16:06, and I came across the line 2nd in 16:19. Not quite the time I was hoping to run, but it's all that I could muster today.

Results can be found here.

After a quick breakfast, we headed over to Durrance Lake for the swim workout. 4km or so, with 2 rounds of 3 x 300 solid efforts (without a wetsuit). The lake was quite busy today, which was to be expected, and we had to make sure not to swim into any fishing hooks!

An ez spin later on in the day, finished off the day of training.

Updating US Swim Trials, 2 more WR's fell tonite. Aaron Piersol lowered the Men's 100 Bk WR to 52.89, and the Women's 100 Bk WR was broken for the 3rd time, with Natalie Coughlin breaking 59.00 (58.97). That brings us to 6 WR's broken (4 events)

Hagman, Finger, and Cujo??

Really??

That's the best the Leafs can do on the Opening Day of Free Agency?

Niklas Hagman 4 yrs, $12 million
Jeff Finger 4 yrs, $14 million
Curtis Joseph 1 yr, $700,000

Who is Jeff Finger anyways? $14 million over 4 years?? Just brutal.

Here's hoping the Leafs get John Tavares in the draft next summer.