Epic France — Day 7

Its Sunday morning at 9:25am as I type this waiting for John Newsom to come downstairs to where wireless internet connection is possible. He'll show me the short-cut to cut and paste so maybe I can get this blog up to date.

In Font Romeau

A little editorial .........

If you're a cycling fan then you've no doubt read the news about a huge blood doping set-up to cater to the needs of professional cyclists being investigated. Its pretty big news over here as you can imagine. There's lots of talk about who is utlimately culpable for this situation but I put it down to the nature of human beings - we want to win. It doesn't matter if the Tour is 5,000km like it used to be or they make it series of flat criteriums - the desire to win will always make rule enforcement an important issue. I certainly hope they don't dilute the Tour's magnificent routes more than they already have over the last 20 years. When Hinault and Lemond were duking it out the whole course was a hell of a lot longer and harder than it is these days. There's speculation that the higher avrage speeds in the Tour are due to drugs or technology but I think its mostly because they've reduced the distance by about 30%!

Shortening it further isn't going to address the issue of cheating one bit. It will only dimish the Tour.

Today we hopped in the pool at 6am. The schedule today is swim, breakfast, rest, 10:30 run, lunch, rest, 1:30 ride. Im not sure how long we'll ride today. Its sort of a re-group day so we might keep it to under 80km. But even that's hard here as tht will probably get us over 3,000ft of climbing no matter where we go.

Gordo and Mike Montgomery are still in a very close battle for the camp Yellow Jersey based on or quirky little points system so its making for some entertaining days.
Mike stayed in to do 6km long course this morning. At 6,000ft. that's long time in the pool!

At breakfst he was ribbing G-Man with a little bit of "so do you want to ride to Barcelona and back today???"

As I was heading downstairs to do this blog I saw Gordo heading out for a "little warm-up" run of 7o minutes before meeting the group for a run at 10:30. So he'll end up doing 2 hours for some more bonus points.

Cheers,

Scott