How close were you to Cookie?

Now we freely admit, in the TA's house this question normally accompanies the discovery of empty packets and trails of crumbs, but that's our problem and to be honest, in the quest for a light bike, cutting cookies would be a lot cheaper than going overboard on crabon fribé tube-sets and titanium bolts. Not that a full-on crabon frame hung with a groupset milled from exotic metals and held in place with bolts made from even more exotic metals wouldn't be cool, but ultimately, putting the kibosh on a$20/week biscuit habit would be a more economical choice. ITTET and all.

Rather, we are talking about Cookie McKilt, the prize in the Cookie Counter/Tartan Tally smackdown. Ron McScotch gave Cookie a new home, which we understand to be full of bacon, and indeed pork-based breakfast items of many kinds.

Whilst famously addicted to chocolate chip cookies, one suspects breakfast biscuits of the Southern style are becoming part of Cookie's diet.

Back to the Tally. To remind you, the end-of-season numbers looked like this;

Ron won the match on absolute numbers, with 38 events (up to and including the Wine Run on the morning of the banquet) vs. Mark's 22 events. This 22 included two RDing gigs (DILB and Shubie-Doobie).

We always said we would not discriminate between 5Ks and Ironman (or beyond). This turned out not to be an issue as they were pretty even in the events they took on; Ron raced over distances from 5 km to 287 km, Mark from 5 km to 224 km. If we took into account distance traveled, well Ron came out with 1436.6 kms (give or take) with Mark at 1050 km. Score another one for the kilt. However, dividing by the number of races (see note below the table), then Mark travelled 52.3 kms per event, whilst Ron travelled on average 37.8 km. In other words, Mark did the equivalent of an Ultramarathon each time out of the gate, whilst Ron "only" managed three miles short of a full marathon each time he pinned on a number. So Mark won that one and was duly awarded a Cookie Monster tuque, to accompany him on his ski-marathons (and beyond).

By now the obvious question has presented itself and we know your brows are furrowing as you try to figure out how you did last year. Let us start the ball rolling. Since disposing of a horribly fast 5K (for us) on Boxing Day, we were able to finally do the math and finished the year with 22 events, from 5K to the marathon for a total of 452 km. That's all races; running, dus, tris, bike-races, anything with a chip or a bib-number or a plate-number.

Looks like three peaks; one at 10K for 10Ks and cyclocross (8 races of various types), another at the half-marathon (three halfs) and a third at the marathon (three fulls and the duathlons were all about this long too). This averages out at 20.5 km per race, or about a half-marathon each time we were handed a handful of safety-pins or a chip, with the 5Ks cancelling out the marathons. Sounds about right.

As for Cookie, we were nowhere close. But we still have our knees (well kinda), so it's all swings-and-roundabouts.

So tell us, how did you do? Answers; # races, total kms and average kms on the right please. Again, that's any race in any discipline; so long as there was a bib, plate, chip or something "official" (a cat#6 sprint over the MacDonald Bridge on the morning commute doesn't count). The fields are independent, so you'll have to tell us all three. They are also anonymous, so don't worry.

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No snow yet.....

Our apologies for being a bit quiet for a week there. You would be forgiven for thinking we were celebrating the blog's one-year anniversary by going off-line and having a nap on the couch. Nothing can be further from the truth (You want the truth? You can't handle the truth. Sorry about that, couldn't resist!). We hope in our absence, Scott and his oppos over at TriNB were keeping you amused. That whole Cipolini/machismo thing was worth a read, and a smile and some of the other stuff, well it's not triathlon but life isn't 100% triathlon 100% of the time.

Now that the Holiday season has indubitably arrived, to the delight of romanticists and the chagrin of Grinches alike, you would be correct in thinking that the sporting season for us lot has well and truly finished. Back in October, many of you indicated a willingness to carry on racing; late-season road-races, trail races, cyclocross, and the U23 athletes were busy racing Varsity. Now, well even Ron McScotch hasn't used a safety pin for a couple of weeks, and if there's a race out there to be done, he can sniff it out. So surely there can be no way that even the TA can turn this into a triathlon article.

Well, perhaps we can turn the absence of events into an article, and even a poll. Yes, a poll. They've kinda fallen by the wayside recently, so we think we'll get them back up and running.

Firstly, the results from the last poll, which we realise we put up just after Legs for Literacy in Moncton in late October. Following Colin Edwards' disappointment with a race-winning 36' 10K we asked if 36' was really a fast time for a 10K. A clear majority, 61% of you said Yes, it was, with only 23% Grinches saying No it wasn't. The Yeses increased to 75% if we ranked the 14% Obi-Wan Kenobis as yes, because unless you are Kenenisa Bekele, the question really makes no sense. So Colin, yes, we all think you're still fast and to be honest, looking at the times, you can still beat everyone in TNS in a flat 10K.

Before you out there say anything about how your time at the Navy 10K was faster, remember, the Navy 10K is really the Navy 9.5 K, so you should have added a couple minutes to your time before you voted!

To business. The TA enjoyed a really nice ride in the snow last week, a lack of a properly functioning front-brake notwithstanding (tips on retrofitting disk-brakes onto canti-boss braze-ons gratefully accepted) so we ask firstly, are you sill riding outside? We know from last year that the bike is the first thing you tend to give up in the winter. However, the weather in Nova Scotia has persisted in remaining in "s@#*^y autumn" mode instead of progressing gracefully into winter. This means, should you be so inclined, bolting your bike into a trainer can be postponed and as riding outside in autumn is perfectly fine with the addition of a pair of knee-warmers, a Flemish-cap (of the woolly ear-flapped millinery rather than the disputed fishing territory variety, señor) and some long-fingered gloves, we don't think this is an overly obtuse question.

We'll post another poll in a couple of days, but you'll have to do some math for that one, so in the meantime do this one then sharpen a couple of pencils and revise your long-division. You can leave your log tables in your bag and yes, calculators will be allowed.

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Happy Birthday To Us

Well, it's one year ago we started publishing, so that's a happy-birthday to us. Let's see where we stand since we typed "I'm back.....".

On the Facebook side, we have (as of today) 340 "likes", which represents something like 60% of our current membership of 500+. In reality, of course, it isn't so cut-and-dried. We have likes from all over the country, indeed the world including the UK and Australia (I wouldn't get too excited by any page-views from the Philippines, one suspects these are just misdirected searches for the TA's other name). On a monthly basis, about 75% of our "likes" check in with us via Facebook. So, about 45% of our members (75% of 60%) use Facebook to keep tabs on us, which makes it a reasonably effective and efficient way of reaching our membership. Then there's the multiple-reader effect; if one person in a house reads, then it reaches all members of that house.

The demographics of our FB friends mirror what we think our reality is; we are an organisation of 25-45 year-old guys being chased (in the words of ex-Pres Dan Gautreau) by the 25-45 year old women.

Onto the blog you're reading now; the TurnAround. We've published a round 100 articles (101 with this one), with just under 8000 page-views. A huge shout-out goes to all the contributors; Kurt Stevenson, Mark "Cookie Monster" Campbell, Marie-Claude Gregoire, Chris "Bighead"Milburn and Ryan MacDonald all contributing directly, whilst Ron MacDougal, Mike Parker and the crew at Live Multisport have all contributed ideas, content and the like. As we always say, this is your blog, not mine, and a sincere thank-you for making this what it is. Keep 'em coming.

It is nice to see that when ranked articles contributed by Ryan, Cookie and Chris all make the top-ten list.

The global reach of the TA is impressive. Most page-views are from Canada, with 500 from the States, >150 from the UK, 120 from Oz and a handful each from Germany, China, Denmark, Japan, Slovenia and Russia. The TA can take the credit for some of those UK hits when we were updating the blog from Worlds, but we're pretty sure we weren't anywhere near the Pacific or Eastern Europe this year.

Most of you reach the blog through a Facebook update or by googling "triathlon + nova + scotia + blog". In an interesting snap-shot, we see TNS collectively is still predominately on PCs and most of you still use Internet Exploder with a few iconoclasts on Chrome or Firefox or something even more exotic. No judgement, just saying. Very few of you use us Mobile. Is the blog limited on mobile devices or is finding TNS when out and about not of importance to you? Let us know.

Also, as you'll have noticed, we recently automated the Facebook/blog update system. We added a couple of other news-feeds we thought you might like. If you find this annoying (the ITU updates a lot) let us know and we'll think about taking that bit down.

At the recent TriCan AGM and Sport Leaders Conference we collectively found, in talks with communications professionals and other triathlon PSOs, that we could be doing so much more with social media but, and this is a bit but (no jokes please) compared to other PSOs we are kicking ass and leading the way! Nice to see TNS showing well at the national level.

In the coming year we'll try to use these tools more effectively. We've already started to use Facebook as a calendar and we'll continue to use it as a separate online calendar with race-dates and other dates (such as the awards banquet - November 5th 2011 - mark your calendars now). The blog has already spawned a second blog, that of the Provincial Training Centre; between the TA's inane spouting and Shane's altogether saner advice on the PTC blog, we'll try to keep you informed. trained, motivated and occasionally amused.

We said last year we would "sort out" trins.ca and we're still trying to do that. So, in the meantime, use FB and the blogs as your primary point of contact, and whenever anyone asks, send them to those URLs to get a taste of who we are and where we're at.

Here's to another fruitful online year!

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Oh; who's bringing cake?

A few more pictures

A few more pictures from the TriCan AGM to finish off the 2010 season for you. It was held at the Chateau Frontenac, which was suitably Christmassy looking for the season, as indeed did most of the town...

The 25th Anniversary Gala was held on the Saturday night. There was a silent auction with a great amount of triathlon stuff and memorabilia on offer. Our friends at TriNB

see here together with TriNL's Glenn Smith (somehow we missed the shot) scored a set of tri-suits from Beijing

Simon's suit was the spare, still having the Orca tag in, one of the others seemed to have turned a pedal or two in anger.

Just in case you forgot, Simon listed his Olympic palmares on the suit.

OAT scored Kathy Tremblay's spare trisuit.

We also all got our Secret Service Triathlon Canada pins.

A little bling, not much but we don't need much.

That pretty much wraps up our AGM report. Normal service will be resumed shortly

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Most of the photos from TriNB's blog.