Watching Le Tour

As I write this we are about two-thirds of the way through one of the most iconic and well-known bike races in the world, the Tour de France.

I've always enjoyed watching the tour, but this year it's also become a great training tool.  Over winter the wind trainer and my old bike have been set up in the lounge so I can do 60 minutes of spinning on the bike in the evenings.  This is a great example of how ironman takes over your life...!  The lounge is great as I can at least watch some TV while I'm pedalling away - it can get pretty tedious on the wind trainer with no changing scenery and no changing terrain, so the TV at least provides some distraction. 

Anyway, the Tour de France has added another dimension.  Each day the last 2 hours of the Tour are replayed on Sky Sport and Coach Dave has been recording each stage and taking them to Jim's garage where we have set up our wind trainers and bikes for "Le Tour de Garage".  Most evenings between 3 and 8 keen cyclists turn up and we do a 60-90 minute spin session on the wind trainers while watching the coverage of the Tour.

As a bit of fun we have our own points classification system - points for turning up and bonus points for various things, such as wearing tour gear and having particularly exotic beer in your bidon cage.  The Tour de France cap I brought back for Pete last year has had a couple of outings at Tour de Garage and pizza turned up another night which added a new dimension as we tried to imagine the logistics of eating a slice of pizza while biking the ironman leg in the style of Dean Karnazes, who famously eats pizza on his all-night training runs.

An added interest has been watching the teams and I've been following Team Radioshack, Lance Armstrong's team.  Lance is completing his final tour and had some back luck early on in the race meaning he isn't going to be one of the top finishers this year.  However he leaves a real legacy and is taking the opportunity to enjoy the tour and acknowledge the fans along the way.  I really admire what he's done for cancer research, which is something really dear to his heart, and look forward to seeing how he transitions to ironman next year.  Kona 2011 will be interesting!