A Leap Year Bike-Y!

Leading things off this week with a pretty fun video. Since when you watch it you might not understand it, but what they are doing is throwing a raw egg off a 22m roof, and it lands on a pad of Asics Gel without breaking. Pretty cool i thought. I also heard that a full 50% of the New York Marathon finishers in 2007 wore Asics shoes. That surprised me, especially with so many other choices for runners. Anyhow...that was a mere Bike-Y warmup...


Nice picture above of Mr Bike-Y Canada! Dominic Rollin did indeed finish this year's Tour of California in the green sprinters jersey, even if he had to finish strong on Sunday to hold of Team CSC's sprinter JJ Haedo. So a huge Tour for the Canuck, with an epic stage win and a Sprint Title. Not bad for someone from a land covered in snow in February! Cyclingnews put together a nice profile of Dominic here.

Speaking of the Tour of California, Levi Leipheimer did win the Tour of California last weekend. However, more interesting is the new Trek website called letleviride.com which includes a petition to ride in this year's Tour de France. So far 46,000 fans have signed up, and I'm sure exactly zero French race organizers care. Plus, shouldn't we start a letcontadorride.com web site, being he's the champion and all Levi does is wheel suck for 3500 km?

158 days until the Olympics, and I hope all of you have been watching the very good (but way too short) half-hour CBC show called "Countdown to Beijing". It airs Mondays at 730 pm local time and is a great preview of the Summer Olympics. Although they spend the majority of time on Canadian athletes (including Simon Whitfield, Alex Despatie, Tyler Christopher, Perdita Felicien, etc) and teams, it also touches on Beijing life and international superstars (Paula Radcliffe and Michael Phelps). Well-worth the 30 minutes a week. You can see more archived video with Ron Maclean here.

Dopers beware! The new HGH test might be ready for the Olympics, which could potentially lead to many athletes losing sleep over the possibility of not being able to take their fave supplement. I was shocked to read that the current test only has a 48 hour window. So if you dope 3 days out, you're okay?? Hmmm. I can't believe that we can't figure this out...

A couple of triathlon and running stories before we end for this week...

First off, I picked up the first issue of Canadian Running (on newstands everywhere!) and was pretty impressed. A really good story on Danny Kassap (a potential Bike-Y fave) and lots of Canadian profiles, plus lots of gear reviews. I was impressed, plus it was only $4.95. Go check it out or see their site here.

ESPN actually gave ultra-running some love here. This article talks about Scott Jurek (Mr. Ultra), guys who run 1000 km on a track (unreal), and the Spartathlon (only 153 miles!!). Another worthy read...

Edmonton's own Paul Tichelaar has been tearing it up lately. He won a early season duathlon last week (beating Simon Whitfield) and even got profiled on Slowtwitch this week (for all the ladies out there, there is a pic of a shirtless Paul on there). Anyhow, it appears he is going to go all out for an Olympic spot, so let's cheer him on this year.

And a long last...the violence in Kenya appears to be over. 100,000 children have lost their homes, and over 1000 people dead. I started following this story since top Olympic-caliber runners kept getting injured, or whatever, but it's sad that this kind of thing still happens in 2008.