My Canada Day

Tuesday evening I checked the weather out my front door.  It was sunny and hot.  I left for our group ride in shorts and a short sleeve jersey.  As I drove towards Cochrane I noticed that I was driving towards storm clouds.  And the wind was picking up…  Angie gave us our workout – 3 x 8 min intervals with 8 min of rest in between.  As I started riding I felt like I was going nowhere and this was supposed to be the warm up?  The wind was intense and it was really cooling off.  A group of super strong cyclists up ahead of me pulled off the road and we all debated whether we should be riding in this or not.  We decided to keep going for a bit but it wasn’t long before we turned around and called it a day.  What took 7 minutes riding out in, took 4 minutes to come back in.  That is how much of a difference the wind was playing.  The wind was gusting up to 40 km/h (25 mph) and the temperature had dropped 6C (11F) within an hour.  That just doesn’t make for a fun ride…

Since I had Wednesday off of work to celebrate Canada Day I figured I would make up my bike workout Wednesday morning.  Angie wanted us to cut the workout a bit short since we were that much closer to Great White North.  I went out for a 45 minute ride with 4 x 4 min intervals.  The intervals went really well on the way out, but once I turned around I was riding back into the wind.  Not nearly as strong as yesterday…but I just rode the hills hard and didn’t concentrate on the intervals that much.  After I dropped my bike off back at home I went out for a quick brick run.  I felt good on the run but didn’t have a ton of speed.  Oh well!

I had planned on going to the pool later but I much preferred doing a few things around the house and relaxing.  Pretty soon it was time to head to my brother and sister-in-law’s place for some Canada Day BBQ.  Dave had picked up some wood chips that were made from old oak barrels that were used to age Jack Daniels.  Just sniffing the bag of chips was enough to make you feel like you had just downed a stiff drink!  Dave smoked a pork shoulder that was amazing!
We devoured some pulled pork sandwiches with some sweet and spicy BBQ sauce and coleslaw on a cheese bun.  So good!  A Thirsty Beaver was just the thing to wash it down.
After dinner I headed off to Ranchman’s to get a head start on the Calgary Stampede at Bull Bustin’.  This is an up close and personal invitational bull riding event.  I’ve been to bull riding events before but I’ve normally been way far away so this was completely different!  It also gave me a chance to try out my sport continuous shoot mode on my new camera: It was one fun night, that’s for sure!  I’ll be looking forward to Stampeding when I’m back from Great White North!
Happy birthday to my Dad on Friday, and I hope all of my American friends have a great 4th of July!!