I heard today that I’ll be riding on demo Bontrager wheels over the course of the summer. The guys at Trek have identified the SeatoSea bike tour as a unique opportunity to get a bunch of people to conduct performance reviews while doing relatively high mileage in a relatively short period of time.

I have no idea what kind of wheels I’ve agreed to ride on but they have been touted as “lighter and faster” wheels that will “climb fast and roll easy” so I anticipate that they’re something along the lines of my Cosmic-Elite rims. A very high performance training wheel or an entry-level racing wheel.

I don’t get to keep them indefinitely but I will be putting on probably 7000 kms over the course of their use. I’ll post pictures when I get them next week.

Three cheers for Edmontonian Paul Tichelaar who will be representing Canada at the Beijing Olympics this summer. The world championships were held on Sunday in Vancouver and Paul needed to place top 8 to guarantee his slot for the Olympics. He missed top 8 by 0.7 seconds but this morning Triathlon Canada made their final selection and weren’t totally stupid, they sent what I expected to be the team over to Beijing. Simon Whitfield and Paul Tichelaar will be representing Canada along with the help of Colin Jenkins who will probably race with a domestique strategy to help the others on the bike ride if at all possible by breaking wind and helping out here and there with strategy.

These guys really did a good job yesterday, racing the kind of race that is likely to be seen at Beijing with essentially everyone getting off the bike together. The swim was cold though and there’s essentially no chance that there will be wetsuits at Beijing. At any rate, the guys with good swim and run strength fared well. Essentially everyone rode under 1 hour for 40 kms which is pretty sweet. The run musn’t have been as easy as other courses as Docherty and Gomez were the only people to run under 32 minutes for 10k.

Convocation was Wednesday in Edmonton. I at first thought it was a pretty outrageous idea to travel all the way up the QEII highway just to walk across a stage and get 3 seconds of fame. Indeed it was as expected, three seconds of walking across a stage, but everything else was pretty good and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Dean Lynch bought all of the grads lunch and we has a chance to catch up with a few classmates. Then we did a few photos in the gowns and headed over to the Jubilee Auditorium for a few speeches and a parade across the stage.

I have to say that I thought the speeches were a ton better than expected, I wondered sometimes as an undergrad how out of touch the administration was with what actually went on on campus. While I’m probably still justified in thinking that to a certain extent what everyone had to say was particularly relevant to the occasion and as a whole rather well presented.

So as Dr. Zemp would say “I’m running out of things to say so let’s look at some pictures”

Highway 40 is the highest paved piece of asphalt in the Canadian Rockies and is closed over the winter due to large amounts of snow, it remains closed through the spring season to encourage natural migration of wildlife in the valley until the middle of June each year. The gate at the south end is approximately 37 kilometers from the summit of the pass and is a popular road to get in some cycling prior to opening to vehicular traffic each spring. You can even get away with parking jobs that look like this:

Each year since 2005 there have been a group of cyclists loosely associated with the Sea-to-Sea trip of 2005 that have made an annual event out of the ride. This year 15 cyclists showed up at the gate around 9:45 am and were ready to set off up the road. Amongst them were 4 cyclists from Alberta participating in the Sea-to-Sea bike ride set for the summer of 2008 which would begin in exactly 1 month!

• Joshua Krabbe
• Kathryn Matzigkeit
• Gerry Loonstra
• Fred Folkerts

After setting off it was a group of 5 people whom I ended up riding with for the majority of the ride up the pass. And when I say up I really do mean up, there wasn’t a whole ton of freewheeling and the breeze even though it was gentle and inconsequential that day was certainly not to our benefit. The sun was out and everyone was in a good mood and conversation topics for the day varied from triathlon to cleaning up after messy teenage girls to some cycling related topics unmentioned in the interest of good taste. Even though our group of 5 never really saw anyone else from our group of 15 until we parked for lunch I can only assume the whole entourage must have been enjoying a similarly spectacular day with great weather and good company.

Following a lunch break just at the bottom of the final ascent we rolled out as a group of eleven and made our way up the last and steepest portion of the highway. Rounding a bend within 2 kilometers of the top our path was blocked by the remaining snow from the winter. So much for actually getting to the top of the pass this year, discussing with some other cyclists on the road (and there were many, this road is not a well kept secret) the snow averaged knee deep for a whole mile and in places was going to be hip-deep. No-one had the motivation to get wet just to take their picture by the sign which should have looked like this (the 2007 edition). So we gathered for another snack (only 5 kms further up the road, but don’t tell anyone) and a couple group photos.

The benefit of riding uphill for a good portion of the morning into a minor headwind is that there is no reason whatsoever to break a sweat on the way back to the vehicle. Of course I retained the right to voluntarily break a sweat because I had a score to settle with my personal land-speed-record. My season’s best thus far had been 74 kilometers per hour and change. I had also dealt with a little bit of speed wobble occurring starting around 72 kph when clocking that speed into a rather moderate headwind. Off we went down the hill, and it was fast. After 4 kilometers of being totally spun out in my top gear (125 rpms in a 53×12 gear can’t get me past about 68 kph) or tucking in with my chin resting on the handlebar stem I looked down at my bike computer. My average speed was in the high fifties and rapidly falling as I coasted up a hill. I decided I needed a photo of that average speed, it wasn’t about to happen again soon. By the time I had my camera out and could snap a photo my average speed had fallen all the way down to fifty. We regrouped after the next pitch which wasn’t quite as steep and then compared top-speeds. If I recall correctly there were 6 of us who had cracked the 70 kph mark and I had indeed broken my personal best with a 75.3 kph recording.

The rest of the ride out was fast and 4 of us swapped pulls at the front. I managed 5 more times to get over 70 kph down various pitches. That’s amazing for something that is typically a rather rare occurrence for myself. I think I had only done so 13 times before in my entire life (last season I rode without a cycling computer so it is inexact). I’m going to quit counting now, a better question obviously is “can I get to 80 kph?”

More photos from the day are in this year’s Training Gallery

The map of the route including elevation profile can be seen here which indicates the elevation from the start to the turnaround was 630 meters.