Back at Home

Well after a whirlwind couple of weeks that took me to eight cities in two weeks I'm back at home now and ready to really amp up training. For those of you who don't really follow my Twitter feed, in the past couple weeks I've been to Denver, back home to Calgary, then off to Manchester UK, Zurich, Prague, Vienna, London, and now I'm home sweet home.

Denver is a great city and I really loved the atmosphere which actually reminded me a lot of Calgary. I was down there for a business conference for 3 days but managed to get a bike and a run in on separate days. Running along the Cedar Creek trail I was amazed at how many nice bikes there were and how fit my not so random sample of the Denver population was. Very impressive! As badly as I wanted to I couldn't make it over to Boulder, CO. There was something about getting to the triathlon Mecca that I really felt the urge to do, but sadly I was just too busy to take the few hours out, maybe next time.

Then it was back to Calgary for literally 48 hours and then off to Europe for a week of travelling. Manchester, and my brief time in Zurich were great, but the focus of the trip was Prague and Vienna. Prague is a beautiful city, but not so bike friendly, though judging from the mountain bikes on car bike racks, I sense there's something else to the region.

I actually came across a Polka Dot Jersey in Prague and the Nike shop, which after much deliberation and twitter consulting, I decided to buy. I wasn't too sure about buying the King of the Mountains jersey, which is what the polka dots signify, but I am good at the climbs, I love what the jersey represents, and this only urges me to train harder. I've got my jersey, time to make doubly sure I've earned it.

Vienna was fantastic, we took a 3 hour bike tour of the city and were able to stay on dedicated bike paths, or quiet streets the entire time. There was a range of bikes on the paths from single speed and fixie commuter/cruisers, to full suspension carbon mountain bikes, to wicked triathlon/road bikes, lots of Kuota's and Madone's in particular.

Anyways, last week was a lot tougher to get training in, originally all I was going to do was run and dry land training, but we spent so much time walking and standing I knew going for morning runs would be inviting ITB syndrome or something like that. I needed a week of recovery anyways from 4 weeks of building that my coach and I figured I could do since I'd have a full week off of big training.

My next race is the Chinook Half Ironman on June 18, so less than two weeks away. Then after that I'm running stage 10 of the Kananaskis K100 relay. So a busy few weeks ahead!