Update week on bike-y....

A few quick things this week...

First off, this weekend is Milan-San Remo on the Pro Cycling Tour. 25 teams, 300 freaking kms! Pretty epic day in the saddle. It seems as though the race often comes down to a bunch sprint, so all the big sprinters in the world (Boonen, Friere, Petacchi, McEwen, Hushovd, etc) are all there. Should be interesting to see how it turns out. Here's the background story and i'll have a recap next week, or head over to velonews.com on Saturday.

Okay, lots of updates from previous Bike-y's!

• Ryan Shay autopsy results are in, and he died of natural causes. Phew. I guess i should say how happy that no drugs were found, and how sad it is that such a talented athlete died at a such a young age. 
• Jan Ullrich is in the news again. Prosecutors will drop the doping charges against him if he pays a million dollar fine. Huh? How does that work? The German legal system might be worse than the American one. Sheesh...
• Geb appears to be out of the Olympic marathon for good now. And he says other athletes will follow - for pollution reasons, not political ones. 
• Next week the UCI will decide on the punishment for all those teams and all those riders who went against their wishes and raced Paris-Nice. We'll see what happens here - could be very interesting, or it could be a lot of noise about nothing. By the way, David Rebellin from Gerolsteiner won the race. Yippee...

Oh, one more note on Geb. He ho-hummed himself to a 59 minute and 15 seconds half-marathon in Lisbon last weekend. This guy is unreal. 13.1 miles in under a hour. Wow.

Ok, maybe i should have posted this before i talked about the speed of Geb, but we have some pretty fast Canucks too. Courtesy once again from Simon Whitfield's blog, here is Team Canada beating the hell out of some treadmills. The best part of this video is watching Kirsten Sweetland pounding out the intervals with the boys. She's going rock in 08!!

That's it for now, lots more next time...

22 minutes of bike-y goodness

Truthfully, the bike-y world is just not as exciting as the running world. But Run-ny Friday is never going happen. A nice mix this week...some bikey stories, then some running stories, with some tri gear too...read on...

**** I've included links for the following paragraph but please dont read them, you'll only get depressed. For clarity's sake, i've made them very small links.****

Paris-Nice (7 day race) is going on as we speak (Friday is day 5). Pretty big race in the pro cycling world. Now, there was some huge drama here after the organizers of the race (also the organizers of the TDF) decided to not invite UCI teams like Astana to the Paris-Nice race. Then since that was breaking UCI rules (all ProTour teams are supposed to be invited to the elite races), UCI pulled their race licence, the ASO went to French Cycling Federation to get a license, then UCI warned that any team that competed at Paris-Nice (now an unsanctioned event) would get fined and any rider would get suspended for 6 months (including the Olympics and World Championships), so some riders dropped out, but most teams basically called their bluff, etc. Blah blah blah - too many beaurocrats flapping their gums. Why did I even type those last sentences? To date, no fines or suspensions. Pro cycling is such a stupid sport sometimes. And nothing really exciting has happened so far in this race, except Cadel Evans did win the race up Mount Ventoux on Thursday.

Much more fun is watching our Edmonton buddy Tich (Paul Tichelaar to non-Bikey followers) and his buddy Simon Whitfield decided to do a cool little video of them riding in Sedona, Arizona. Tough life, especially as some parts of our province are getting snow this fine morn. Plus it's got some cool music.



Cycling awareness is something that we all agree should be more mainstream. The London transportation department has come up with a cool little game/video that you all can play here. For those of you who don't play games, you can at least read the cycling safety advice they provide.

Cool product of the week: i finally found one that piqued my interest. They're called ActiveSpokes, and they are basically sliding weights that shift the apparent rim weight depending on whether you're ascending or descending a hill. I was a little skeptical at first, and I'm still not real sure of how they work, but the concept makes sense, and the editorials on the site appear legit. Hmmm...only $99?

2 big-ish stories regarding the little Canadian company that could, Cervelo! I think it would be fair to say that Cervelo's have done well with their sponsorship of the CSC pro cycling team. However, next year, there will be no CSC team. CSC has decided to end their sponsorship (what exactly is CSC? Anyone?) and therefore the Riis team needs a major sponsor. Who knows what role Cervelo will play with the new sponsor.

Second, the internet is alive with rumors of a new Cervelo tri bike called, of course, the P4C. Some of the forum posts I've heard that this is still vaporware, and a new bike might not be out til next year as a 2010 model. Who knows, but I'm sure lots of P3C's will be available for cheap as lightly used options.

2 marathon updates - both with potential Beijing implications. Paula Radcliffe has a toe injury, and is OUT of the London Marathon. Too bad, she's an amazing runner and always goes all out. She does entertain the viewers by going out harder and just obliterating those who try to stay with her.

Bigger news that Radcliffe (hard to believe) has to do with the current men's world record holder Haile Gebrselassie. Last week, he announced he would not run the marathon in Beijing because the pollution levels are off-the-chart, and they make his asthma symptoms worse. Fair enough. His plans instead have him trying win his 3rd Olympic Gold Medal in the 10,000m. However, here is a comment on the strength of the Ethiopia 10,000m team. In addition to reigning Olympic champion Kenenisa Bekele and silver medallist Sileshi Sihine, Gebrselassie will be facing a battle against a host of up and coming young runners including All-African Games 10,000m silver medallist Tadesse Tola and Abebe Dinkessa, a runner with a 10,000m personal best of 26:30 (courtesy of iaaf.org). Wow. For the record, Canada will have ZERO runners qualify for the 10,000m.

However, Geb might have changed his mind a bit as the news of his decision shocked the running world. He now says he might run the Olympic marathon if they move the race to the morning and run it outside of the city of Beijing. Well, since the race was already scheduled to start at 730 am local, i guess he only needs one more thing. So we'll see what happens. Hopefully he ends up on the start line...i'll keep you posted.

Whohoo...gear time. For those of you who love new tri gear, and especially for those of you who don't read Inside Triathlon, this year they did publish an online Buyer's Guide. So click away at this year's best Swim/Bike/Run products. A few new toys never hurt anyone...

Last thing this week...the fine folks at ProBikeKit.com have added 2 new things to their vast repertoire of bike products. For those PBK virgins out there, they are based in the UK, but with unbelievable low prices on bike parts, free (and fast) shipping, they are a valuable resource when you need to pick up some inexpensive (sometimes half off the Canadian price) tires or tubes, this place rocks. Anyhow, they do have the new-for-2008 Michelin Pro Race 3 tires right now (for $39 or so) and some great prices on Craft running and triathlon clothing. Check it out. Thank me later.

Phew...big bike-y in the books. See you next Friday...

Canada Wins Gold!

Ok, i know it's not on a bike, but it is a big deal anytime a Canadian wins a World title in anything. Tyler Christopher (who trains here in E-town) won the Gold Medal in the 400m at the World Indoor Track & Field Championships in Valencia. The story is here, but King Tyler is only the 7th Canadian to win a World Indoor title (hmmm, Bruny Surin twice, Perdita Felicien, Ben Johnson, Debbie Scott,and Mark McKoy are the others...thanks to Wikipedia and about an hour wasted for that list). Sweet, I sure hope that this will spill over to an outdoor track in Beijing.

I'm still efforting the video.

See you on Friday for more...

You might be a redneck bike-y edition...and Go Edmonton Go...

We're leading off with a video this week. Thanks to J Curran for passing this video on. Just start watching from the 27 second mark on...it's amazing video!



Breaking news:Kudos this week go to Edmonton's own Megan Metcalfe, who broke a 21-year old Canadian record in the indoor 3000m today at the World Indoor Track Championships. She cruised around the track in 8 minutes 48 seconds (remember: 3 km!) to break the Canadian record by 2 seconds. Nice run Megan, and hopefully she will continue to improve and have a great year. The final goes tomorrow. There are 8 Canadians competing at Worlds, but Perdita is not...not sure why...

Congrats also go to Edmonton's Paula Findlay, who is Canada's best junior triathlete. She also finished 5th in the junior race at a North American and Latin American XC race last weekend. Solid result, any time the triathletes can compete with the full-time runners! Bodes well for Paula...and for Canada. Actually, Canada won 3 of the 4 races last weekend (US only won the senior mens race).

Oh yeah: my title story. Last weekend the world's richest half-marathon took place in the United Arab Emirates. A whopping $300,000 is paid to the men's and women's winner. Although not surprisingly won by two Kenyans (one is ex-pat Kenyan to be honest), what caught my eye was that the men's winner was using his money to buy his mom a tractor. Hmmm. Methinks $300,000 would buy Mom a nice retirement place but he wants to get her a tractor. Whatever motivates you to run fast i guess...

Ok, screw the bike-y stuff, here are some more funny running stories. I did find out about another marathon winner/disqualified-for-being-a-cheater (who appeared to skip an out-and-back, whoops). When researching this one, I found an interesting link where there appears to be some behind-the-scenes conspiracy that maybe Katie Holmes did NOT run the entire NYC marathon. Pretty funny comments though...especially people that claim she couldn't run 26 miles without a running bra.

Product of the Week (or Quarter, I've been slacking on this one) is this magnet-y stick-on device for wearing iPods on your workout wear. Pretty useful perhaps. Guys might want to look here for more pics on how to wear this during weightlifting.

Sad story on running to end up. Guy runs fast (3 hours 2 minutes) at a marathon, then drops dead at the finish line. Not good. I felt terrible just reading about this...

Next week will be bike-y heavy!! Promise...