Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Stage 1, and we go for a mud bog

American George Hincapie is wearing the yellow jersey today, so perhaps the Tour will get a few minutes on SportsCenter tonight. (Cranky, cranky. I guess fans of soccer, or sailing, or any other niche sport feel this way, too.)

Instead of watching everything live this morning, we actually went out and rode a bit. (In theory, we are traing for that century, and I am starting to panic.) Normally we'd ride in Rock Creek Park, but sections are still closed from the flooding last week. I'm sick to death of the 5-mile cloverleaf of hills at the park closest to the house. So we decided to dust off the mountain bikes (well, Victor's is a hybrid) and ride on the canal.

I'm always complaining that I'm slow and it feels like I'm riding through mud, but today I had an excuse: we were riding through mud. (Before you say "Duh! Wasn't Maryland under water last week?" we did actually go up to Monocacy and check the towpath yesterday to see if it was in good shape. It was...at the Aqueduct, where the towpath is mostly pea gravel. We decided today to go south from White's Ferry, and that's a lot softer. Not that I realized that til today...)

I didn't have any trouble staying in my target heart rate zone, though, even if I was going only 7 miles an hour.

We got home in time for the last few miles of the race, so we saw the final sprint, and the drama of yesterday's winner Thor Hushovd lying in a puddle of blood after he crossed the finish line. Victor and I were both staring at the replays trying to figure out what happened. It looked like he ran into something along the barrier...you see him look back in the replay, although by the third or fourth time I saw the clip I was thinking he wasn't looking back, he was looking at his bleeding arm. Victor's thought was that he'd cut himself on the ties the plastic barrier, I've seen some speculation that he was cut on one of the hand-shaped signs the spectators have. It sure looked like more blood than would come from a simple scrape, but then in a sprint his heart was pumping, so I guess that would make any wound bleed more.

Whatever it was, I hope it wasn't as bad as it looked, and that they can stitch him up and that he'll start tomorrow.

See, I really did ride:

Update three minutes later: Heh, I guess Victor and I should communicate before we both start blogging the same thing. Well, he types faster, so my post will show up on top.

And Velonews has a picture of Hushovd.

Posted by Nic at July 2, 2006 11:35 AM | TrackBack