Bienvenue a la belle province. The TA is here as part of the officiating team at the Soulanges ITU Continental Cup and, if you don't mind, we thought we might do a bit of blogging from here, a behind the scenes at a big race.
We got here yesterday after driving from Halifax. The first 1300kms were OK, but it took over 2hrs to do the last 90! Imagine taking all the cars in Nova Scotia and, for kicks, PEI, putting them all on the peninsula, close a bridge and a lane on the Rotary and then ask everyone to get home. Chaos! Add to this a suicidal GPS thar wanted us to take the shortest route to Valleyfield, which was crossing to the Ile de Montreal and then crossing back again, a route which would have entailed yours truley spending most of Friday night in traffic jams.
We went for a short run in the rain this morning. Well, it was supposed to be a short run, being our first run since Johnny Miles, but we got a bit lost. Getting lost is a good way to get a nice run sometimes. Today? We intended a 30 or 40 minute run, but we got a bit too lost and ended up at the Bistro St Hubert. Whatbwas ironic is that we couldn't find the Bistro last night, when we wanted to find it, but today we found it straight off the bat. Unfortunately, it's 5 miles from the hotel, so we found ourselves 5 miles from home-base at the half-way point of a four to five mile run! D'oh. We managed to find a bit of a short-cut home, so we were only out for 9 miles!
The race is looking good, unlike last year though there aren't any local (NS) lads to cheer on. Still, a good field with the likes of Cathy Tremblay down to race. We'll try not to look too star-struck.
It's looking like a non-wet-suit swim, but of course that's going to be Janice's call on Sunday. The course is flst, you'd be hard-pushed to find any elevation on it. It more than makes up for this by being technical; lots of corners and quite narrow. You need to be a good bike-handler to survive on here. Fortunately, it should be dry for the race, the weather forecast for Sunday is for sun, but for now it contiues to rain. Thank-goodness for our rain-coat from World Dus. One suspects it'll see a lot of action this weekend.
Well, just a short break then it's back to making lists. You know, one can't shake the feeling something's been forgotten, but we can't work out for the life of us what it is!! The course is all there, it all looks good. The RD has everything under control. Maybe that's what it is; at this point the TA is used to rolling up our sleeves and slinging racks, painting signs, anchoring bouys and generally doing anything and everything meeded to make the race happen on time. With a race this size however, all that RD stuff is covered by the RD, allowing the technical officials to concentrate on being technical officials. So having said that, back to the lists....
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